Keeping business and personal separate

tsservo · January 18, 2008

I have a Smugmug Pro account that's become a bit of a two headed beast. On one side I have my photos that I sell (or, try to at least

with custom pricing and all that fun stuff. On the other I have all my personal photos that effectively form the gallery from my blog.

What I want to do is have everyone that goes to my main photo site address see just the items for sale in my portfolio - basically my best of my best and gets my for-sale prices. Everyone that starts at my blog (family and friends and such) and links to the gallery gets to see everything and gets the family and friends pricing.

I'm fine with posting two separate versions of the photos so I can run two pricing tiers but here's where it gets awkward...

I set up everything that is blog linked as a private gallery, I then set up share groups and manually link to those from the blog. The problem is threefold... I have to remember to add any new galleries to a sharegroup, I have to remember to link new ones from the blog gallery, and it doesn't support any kind of hierarchy or ordering - it just dumps shared albums.

Also, any RSS feeds don't play nicely either. I can only get a dump of the public galleries, not the private ones (makes sense, of course).

So to compensate I've set up multiple sharegroups which at least lets me sort stuff (by country, I get around a bit) for the blog stuff, but organise in another way for the for-sale stuff. But still no subfolders.

This does however allow me to show stuff to some people and not others.

This all gets even more difficult when I want to keep password protected galleries from the for-sale site...

So, my question is... is there a better way? :dunno

Please?

Thanks much for any ideas...

Tim

jfriend · January 18, 2008

Obviously, the cleanest way is to get a second account for personal use. After wrestling with your very problem, that's what I decided to do. But, I presume your asking for potential solutions using one account. Here are some ideas:

Put all your personal images in a category named "personal" (or whatever you want to name it). You can freely use sub-categories in that category too.
On your home page, use custom CSS to hide that personal category, so when people go to your main site, they will not see the personal category and thus will not know about all the galleries in it.
Link your blog to http://www.yourhomepage.com/personal. This will take your friends/family to your personal photos only. The category page will essentially be the home page for your personal site.
You don't have to use private galleries or passworded galleries in this circumstance. The personal galleries are not protected in any way, they just aren't easily discoverable by your business customers.

Other things to think about:

It will be easy for your friends/family to end up at your business site if they follow the breadcrumb to the top level. Probably not a big deal, but you could hack the breadcrumb links with JavaScript when presented in from the personal side of your site to change them if you really wanted to make it a little less likely.
You need to think about searching from Smugmug and searching from Google. To accomplish your objectives of hiding your personal images and/or pricing from your business customers, you probably have to make the personal site unsearchable. You can accomplish most of that by just turning Hello World and Hello Smuggers off in all personal galleries. But you do, of course, sacrifice searching on the personal side. I don't know of any way around that without using two accounts.

tsservo · January 19, 2008

Thanks John. I really like the idea of using CSS to hide the personal category. I don't know why I didn't think of that, but it's simple and straightforward. I originally had the site set up that way - a personal and portfolio section, but couldn't come up with how to hide the personal without making it private - and that snowballed into my current situation...

Even if someone does find the personal section, I'm not terribly concerned. Anything I don't want anyone out of my immediate family to find I password protect anyways.

Perhaps when I'm selling dozens of shots I can justify getting another account to the wife, but for the moment I'm going to have to make due with the one...

I'll drop a line if I run into problems, but I think I'll see if I can make this work...

Thanks much.

Tim

tsservo · January 19, 2008

OK, I'm stumped... I can't figure out how to hide a category. Galleries, yes, as they get a unique id for their divs (and I've seen it in the page source).

Categories do not seem to get a unique id... Code for the categories on the homepage looks like this...

[HTML]<div class="miniBox">
<div class="photo">
<a href="/Personal"><img src="/img/spacer.gif" border="0" alt="Password protected" class="imgBorder passwordcategory_ti" /></a>
</div>

<p class="albumTitle"><a href="/Personal" class="nav">Personal</a></p>

<p class="description">1 gallery with 139 photos</p>
<p class="updated">updated: Dec 01, 2007 9:12am </p>

<div class="spacer"></div>
</div>[/HTML]

That repeats for each category. There's nothing there that I can use to set the visibility. Is there some setting in the control panel that I'm missing to turn that on?

Thanks much

Tim

jfriend · January 19, 2008

tsservo wrote:

OK, I'm stumped... I can't figure out how to hide a category. Galleries, yes, as they get a unique id for their divs (and I've seen it in the page source).

Categories do not seem to get a unique id...

Yeah, too bad, they don't make an ID using the category name that would make this easy from CSS. That has been requested before, but hasn't found it's way in.

It looks like it takes some JavaScript. Here's someone else doing the same thing and posting #6 in this thread. It's even possible to make it show for you when you're logged in, but not for others (which might be convenient).

I posted a feature request to make this doable purely via CSS.

~Jan~ · January 20, 2008

I'm not sure I follow what you're doing currently, exactly. But, I use one SM account for my biz and personal stuff. My personal pics are all in one gallery called "personal" and it's password-protected and private. You can't even see if it you go in on the business side. I've given my family and friends a link to the personal site with the password. It works fine. My business customers have no idea this side of my website even exists.

I'm not sure why you are uploading the same pics in two places, exactly...that's the part I'm confused about. You are selling the pics at different prices to different people? Maybe my site is different because I do portraits only.

photogmomma · January 20, 2008

I tried keeping one site, but it was just too much of a pain. I ended up getting two sites and it's MUCH easier. Heck, it's not really that expensive and that way you can password protect the entire personal site - and not risk some random stranger running across pictures of your kids in the tub.

Good luck with your decision!!

photogmomma · January 20, 2008

I should have read teh whole thing first.

!

Another thing you can do is to create an HTML only gallery that's password protected for family - off that you can have links to everything for the family. Easier to create, but definitely more upkeep.

Good luck!

ivar · January 20, 2008

photogmomma wrote:

I should have read teh whole thing first. !

I'm not sure if it meets all your requirements, but an alternative is to use categories, and only show those to the appropriate people.

Create a 'public' category, and put everything you want publically available in there. Other categories for family, friends, linkage, etc, you can create a different category for.

I've done this on my site similarly. My 'public' photos are in a 'photos' category. This is where the 'galleries' tab takes you if you click on it.

The 'normal' homepage with all my categories is never visible in theory.

Allen · January 20, 2008

Another option would be to create a new private passworded gallery and set
it up like this one with each thumb linking to a personal category. The public
could go directly to one of these categories but would need the direct link.
But setting the same password on every gallery in the category would stop
the public from getting into any of the galleries. Your personal visitors would
only need to enter the password for the landing page.

The galleries would have to be set to public to show under the personal
category.

Then there's some javascript to hide the personal categories from your normal
(business) category page.

~Jan~ · January 20, 2008

ivar wrote:

I'm not sure if it meets all your requirements, but an alternative is to use categories, and only show those to the appropriate people.

Create a 'public' category, and put everything you want publically available in there. Other categories for family, friends, linkage, etc, you can create a different category for.

I've done this on my site similarly. My 'public' photos are in a 'photos' category. This is where the 'galleries' tab takes you if you click on it.

The 'normal' homepage with all my categories is never visible in theory.

This is what I do, but Ivar explained it much better.

tsservo · January 21, 2008

Thanks all for the suggestions. For the moment I've been working with a version of what Ivar mentioned... I set up two categories, one called Portfolio and one for Personal. The personal one links from my blog and the portfolio one is what I link to from my header tabs.

For the moment I took all categories off of the homepage leaving just the slideshow though I did have a spin through the link that jfriend found about hiding categories (which I did get to work and left in there just in case I turn categories on the homepage again).

This should work for the meantime though I've never been one that likes to rely entirely on security through obscurity. I thought about password protecting galleries but it would be a real pain to do them one by one. To the best of my knowledge you can't password protect a category or sub-category (that would be quite nice, imho...)

The one limitation that I've run into with this is the category, subcategory, gallery maximum depth. By doing it this way I lose one level which I relied on... It used to be:

Country name category > State park sub-category > Trail name gallery

Can't do that now, though I'm going to look into what Steve recommended to see if I can work with that.

Anyone know if they're going to open up the hierarchy depth at some point?

Thanks much for the help. This is going to be easier to maintain now.

Tim

richW · January 21, 2008

Allen wrote:

Then there's some javascript to hide the personal categories from your normal
(business) category page.

This is what I use: http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=432217&postcount=8

All the family and friends galleries are public (to keep the breadcrumbs alive) and I set the same password on all galleries so the visitors only have to enter the password once. All I do is supply them with the direct link to the category and they add it as a bookmark. Easy

Gottria · March 26, 2008

OK, stupid question time. How and where do I put this code? I'm trying to hide my "Personal" category from the public.

richW wrote:

This is what I use: http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=432217&postcount=8

All the family and friends galleries are public (to keep the breadcrumbs alive) and I set the same password on all galleries so the visitors only have to enter the password once. All I do is supply them with the direct link to the category and they add it as a bookmark. Easy

Allen · March 26, 2008

Gottria wrote:

OK, stupid question time. How and where do I put this code? I'm trying to hide my "Personal" category from the public.

Put in javascript and edit red for the category name.

      <!-- Hide Categories -->
function delCategory() {
  re = /\/([color=red]Personal[/color])$/;

  var oList = YD.getElementsByClassName('miniBox', 'div', this);

  for (i = 0; i < oList.length; i++) {
    if (re.test(oList[i].getElementsByTagName('a')[0].href))
      oList[i].parentNode.removeChild(oList[i]);
  }
}
YE.onContentReady('categoriesBox', delCategory);
     <!-- End Hide Categories -->

Gottria · March 26, 2008

Thanks Allen, I got that done and it works, I even added 2 categories and it still works :ivar . But, I can't see the galleries when I'm logged in <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/headscratch.gif" border="0" alt="" >.

Allen wrote:

Put in javascript and edit red for the category name.

      <!-- Hide Categories -->
function delCategory() {
  re = /\/([COLOR=red]Personal[/COLOR])$/;
 
  var oList = YD.getElementsByClassName('miniBox', 'div', this);
 
  for (i = 0; i < oList.length; i++) {
    if (re.test(oList[i].getElementsByTagName('a')[0].href))
      oList[i].parentNode.removeChild(oList[i]);
  }
}
YE.onContentReady('categoriesBox', delCategory);
     <!-- End Hide Categories -->

Allen · March 26, 2008

Gottria wrote:

Thanks Allen, I got that done and it works, I even added 2 categories and it still works :ivar . But, I can't see the galleries when I'm logged in .

Thats' the one disadvantage of this. Just use the direct link to the gallery with your nickname in this.
http://nickname.smugmug.com/Personal

jfriend · March 26, 2008

Allen wrote:

Thats' the one disadvantage of this. Just use the direct link to the gallery with your nickname in this.
http://nickname.smugmug.com/Personal

Could the JS also be modified so that it let the categories be visible when logged in?

papajay · March 28, 2008

A similar, but slightly "different" ( I think), situation/question...
I have a small business (nothing to do with photography) with it's own ".com" website.

I have a Power User SmugMug account (not a PRO account..I don't sell photos) which has many galleries...."public", but set as SmugIsland Hello World "NO" , Hello Smuggers "YES"...the contents of which are of primary interest to just family and friends.

I'd like to have a link on my Company website for a "Powered by SmugMug" link to a "category" of business-related photo galleries (with some of the individual galleries being password-protected, and some not) on my Smugmug site.

BUT...I'd want the link on my Company site, and all URL's that show up when following that link, to be a "custom" URL with my company's name in it rather than my Smugmug user name (so business visitors would not be aware that the Smugmug site they're visiting has anything other than "business"-related photos in it).

Apologies for being "obtuse" and wordy...I had some difficulty trying to precisely describe what I'm looking for here. It's possible someone has actually addressed this already, but I wasn't clever enough to see a one-for-one correlation....additional appologies, if that's the case.

Is there really no viable option than to have a second site to accomplish this? I'm OK cutting and pasting a little CSS (if given a template that will work), but would not want to have to ammend, add, edit the CSS everytime I add a new gallery.

Thanks...Papajay

bham · March 28, 2008

papajay wrote:

I have a small business (nothing to do with photography) with it's own ".com" website.

I have a Power User SmugMug account (not a PRO account..I don't sell photos) which has many galleries...."public", but set as SmugIsland Hello World "NO" , Hello Smuggers "YES"...the contents of which are of primary interest to just family and friends.

I'd like to have a link on my Company website for a "Powered by SmugMug" link to a "category" of business-related photo galleries (with some of the individual galleries being password-protected, and some not) on my Smugmug site.

BUT...I'd want the link on my Company site, and all URL's that show up when following that link, to be a "custom" URL with my company's name in it rather than my Smugmug user name (so business visitors would not be aware that the Smugmug site they're visiting has anything other than "business"-related photos in it).

Apologies for being "obtuse" and wordy...I had some difficulty trying to precisely describe what I'm looking for here. It's possible someone has actually addressed this already, but I wasn't clever enough to see a one-for-one correlation....additional appologies, if that's the case.

Is there really no viable option than to have a second site to accomplish this? I'm OK cutting and pasting a little CSS (if given a template that will work), but would not want to have to ammend, add, edit the CSS everytime I add a new gallery.

Thanks...Papajay

Papajay it is probably best to start another thread for this and then post a link to the new thread here.

chn · April 9, 2008

papajay wrote:

I have a small business (nothing to do with photography) with it's own ".com" website.

I have a Power User SmugMug account (not a PRO account..I don't sell photos) which has many galleries...."public", but set as SmugIsland Hello World "NO" , Hello Smuggers "YES"...the contents of which are of primary interest to just family and friends.

I'd like to have a link on my Company website for a "Powered by SmugMug" link to a "category" of business-related photo galleries (with some of the individual galleries being password-protected, and some not) on my Smugmug site.

BUT...I'd want the link on my Company site, and all URL's that show up when following that link, to be a "custom" URL with my company's name in it rather than my Smugmug user name (so business visitors would not be aware that the Smugmug site they're visiting has anything other than "business"-related photos in it).

Apologies for being "obtuse" and wordy...I had some difficulty trying to precisely describe what I'm looking for here. It's possible someone has actually addressed this already, but I wasn't clever enough to see a one-for-one correlation....additional appologies, if that's the case.

Is there really no viable option than to have a second site to accomplish this? I'm OK cutting and pasting a little CSS (if given a template that will work), but would not want to have to ammend, add, edit the CSS everytime I add a new gallery.

Thanks...Papajay

If you run your own server like Apache you could use mod_rewrite to point any my.business.com/photo.jpg to my.smugmug.com/photo.jpg .

Or you could just chop off the username from the SmugMug URL (i.e. http://don.smugmug.com/photos/13326_qBpyj-L-1.jpg is the same as http://smugmug.com/photos/13326_qBpyj-L-1.jpg )

papajay · April 9, 2008

chn wrote:

If you run your own server like Apache you could use mod_rewrite to point any my.business.com/photo.jpg to my.smugmug.com/photo.jpg .

Or you could just chop off the username from the SmugMug URL (i.e. http://don.smugmug.com/photos/13326_qBpyj-L-1.jpg is the same as http://smugmug.com/photos/13326_qBpyj-L-1.jpg )

Thanks for the suggestion chn...unfortunately, though, I don't have a dedicated server.

56Kruiser · November 5, 2011

Single photo in personal and public...
Boy, this is an old thread. Seems like it should be a hot topic

I"m in process now of trying to decide how to best handle personal vs for/sale/public photos. But here is what I"m thinking...

I may go somwhere that I take a lot of photos, and a percentage of them I may want to sell. I had thought I could collect those into the appropriate. But in my personal area, I may want to be able to let my friends download th original, but of course not in the business area.

Problem is, the security of the original gallery is maintained and takes precedence of the gallery which it is collected into. I understand that logic, but there is no way around it.

Seems to me that the only option is to upload the photo twice. I haven't tried that yet in two different galleries. I presume I can do that...otherwise I'd have to rename it for the second load.

Any suggestions or corrections to my thoughts?

jfriend · November 5, 2011

56Kruiser wrote: »

Boy, this is an old thread. Seems like it should be a hot topic

I"m in process now of trying to decide how to best handle personal vs for/sale/public photos. But here is what I"m thinking...

I may go somwhere that I take a lot of photos, and a percentage of them I may want to sell. I had thought I could collect those into the appropriate. But in my personal area, I may want to be able to let my friends download th original, but of course not in the business area.

Problem is, the security of the original gallery is maintained and takes precedence of the gallery which it is collected into. I understand that logic, but there is no way around it.

Seems to me that the only option is to upload the photo twice. I haven't tried that yet in two different galleries. I presume I can do that...otherwise I'd have to rename it for the second load.

Any suggestions or corrections to my thoughts?

Collected photos take all the same settings as their original gallery and can't be changed, so if you want different settings for the biz vs. personal, then you will need to upload twice. You can upload the same photo multiple times and they will be completely separate photos. You don't have to rename.

SamirD · November 5, 2011

56Kruiser wrote: »

Seems to me that the only option is to upload the photo twice. I haven't tried that yet in two different galleries. I presume I can do that...otherwise I'd have to rename it for the second load.

You can upload a file twice without a problem (or many times for that matter). There are certain things, like what you're trying to accomplish, that simply require this to be done. No other way around it for now.

Keeping business and personal separate

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