I am new to SmugMug and just recently signed up. My site is www.markandtracy.com. I am needing advice on how to organize my photos for our family website. I am not a professional photographer, just a guy wanting to share my photos with friends and family.

For the past 7 years I have used the open source Gallery software to host my site. You can see my old site at www.markandtracy.net. As you can see at my old site, I just uploaded everything by Year and Month. I am looking for better more meaningful method to organize my photos. We take tons of photos and the old site included everything. It has over 17,000 photos. My goal with the new site was to reduce that down to 2000-3000 meaningful pictures that are well organized.

My plan was to use keywords, lots of keywords. But, I have encountered 2 bugs with keywords that has really dampened my spirits and left me stumped on how to proceed.

My initial plan to was display the keywords block at the top of my site to encourage people to use it but this lead to the first issue. Bug 1) when viewing keyword albums the "most recent" sort actually sorts by most recently uploaded, not most recent based on photo date. This is just wrong to me. Think of it from the viewpoint of my friends and family, if they are looking at the keyword album for Nicole (my daughter) sorted by most recent, they expect to see photos from the past few months, not baby pictures. But, if I uploaded the baby pictures last, that is what they would see.

It was suggested by support to use smart albums. OK, so I did, I am flexible. I will just feature lots of smart albums based on keywords at the top of the site. I think I like this better anyways. Then I encountered the next issue. Bug 2) smart albums don't refresh automatically. I created the smart albums based on keywords and then uploaded photos with the appropriate keywords but the new photos don't show. It is broke and currently you are forced to "refresh" each album every time new photos are uploaded. Seeing how I planned to have 20+ smart galleries based on keywords, this is bad.

Both these issues really disappoint me, but, I am still flexible and open to ideas. I can't help but wonder what other people do for organizing their family website. I really wanted to feature keywords because I planned to use many. For example, if a photo contained Me, my wife and two kids and I tag the photo with keywords for each of our names. That way, if you are viewing the keyword album for any of those keywords the photo will show. What other ideas do you have for organizing photos?

I tried for a time to organize by keywords, but it was just too much work. I dropped keywords altogether and now just organize by year/date. I use categories for the years, with many galleries under each year.

Anybody else? I am starting to wonder if I am the only person that signed up for SmugMug to host a family website. Is everybody that uses SmugMug a pro photographer?

I would say that year/month/day with the addition of events is a good way. Keywords are nice but I've never been able to tag things properly and with some 20-30000 photos online I'm not going to redo them now :)

I also use year/month/days...for organizing

cat: 2010_pics
sub cat(s): 2010_01_jan, 2010_02_feb, etc.
gallery: 2010_JAN_01 some name
gallery: 2010_JAN_02 some name
etc.

according to the DAM book...dates are best
you should remember that Christmas is in December
if you label them all Christmas then you have to guess which year it was, etc.
among other problems

i include the year in the month just in case you (or your wife/kids) drag a folder to the wrong place...
you can find it and return it...

i put the number of the month in front of the (word) month to make it easier to sort sub cats...

for the gallery i actually use the name of the folder the pics are in on my HD

HD: 2010_01_JAN_01_143218_1_some_name
SMUG: 2010_JAN_01_143218_1 some_name

number is from the time of upload from card to HD
last number is how many folders...just a sequential number
i dislike spaces...so i use an underscore...

i then use S*E to upload all the pics/movies and create galleries
all i have to do is drag folder from HD to S*E
S*E sucks in all pics/movies under folder
i add the space in S*E gallery name so that it will wrap nicely on smugmug
select upload
i go to bed/work
S*E creates the galleries
uploads all pics/movies to the correct galleries

we are not PRO's just a lot of family pictures


Edward