Publishing to Smugmug, a geeks view (Part 2)

In part one of this series, I walked through setting things up so that Lightroom and Smugmug were cooperating in getting images published from your catalog onto the net. At this point, however, all I have is one huge gallery named “all images”, and even worse, it’s unlisted and private so nobody can see it.

So far, not very useful. But here’s why I did it this way: by creating a single gallery for all images, and a publishing channel  that means any updates I make to the image can get pushed to Smugmug in place. This implies that links pointing to these images should never break, unless for some reason I unpublished or republish them.

That’s the theory, at least. And by setting it up this way, as my site grows and I try out new things or reconfigure how I want it to look, the changes should be invisible and the underlying link structure should not break; this means I can redecorate or rethink my gallery structure at will without worrying about 404ing links out in the real world, and without having to tear it all apart and start from scratch the way I am doing now — at least for a few years.  I’m trying to not only handle my needs now, but to plan for growth, plan for re-invention and plan for stability — and hopefully not feel like I have to throw it all out in two years when I have some neat new idea on how all of this should work.

The way this is done is through two items: keywords and smart galleries. Within Lightroom, you are (or should be) tagging all of your images with appropriate keywords, good captions and titles and other metadata that describes the image. You ARE doing that, right? Good.

Smugmug smart galleries allow you to define what images should be in a gallery based on a formula, rather than by individual selection. One implication of this is that when you upload images later that fit a gallery’s definition, they will magically show up in that gallery, so you don’t have to upload the images and then spend time sorting out what should go where. Set up your keywords right, define the galleries to use them, and then the site will configure itself.

As an example, have some elephant seals from my Piedras Blancas trip. Aren’t’ they cute?

Typically, my nature images are all keyworded with the same general info; I geotag them (using Google Earth and Jeffrey Friedl’s Geo-encoding plugin). Smugmug’s smart folders in general can access that info I also keyword in the location, using a hierarchical country->state/province->county->city->location, so I use that data to locate an image into a regional gallery. I also include the species and where appropriate common names and the latin name of the animals I’ve photographed. There are ways to simplify your life in Lightroom so you don’t have to remember tagging in all of this info one at a time, which I cover in a previous blog piece I wrote called Some Thoughts on Lightroom Keywords. Taking advantage of keyword synonyms is a time saver, once you figure out how you can take advantage of them. Once you have the keywords set up, publish the images and head over to smugmug.

Within Smugmug’s gallery settings is a section called “smart gallery”. It’s going to look something like this:

For this gallery, I include all images in my “all images” gallery, and then exclude “two star” images, and then restrict images to only those with the keyword “elephant seal”. If you go take a look at the gallery, you see the result.

One of the nice aspects of smart galleries is that you can use them to create subsets of your images, and then use those subsets to help create other smart galleries — they nest. So off in my private gallery area, I’ve taken all of my images and created a subset of them of just my “two star” images, and I can use that to exclude those images out of smart galleries.

I need to do it this way to get around a limitation of smart galleries: they can only hold 1,000 images. Because of this, I can’t create a smart gallery of “3, 4, and 5″ star images, because it would only grab 1,000. Instead, I can create a gallery of the images I don’t want (in my case a relatively small number of low quality images) and filter them out of the main gallery.  As far as I can tell, real galleries have no size limit (at least, I haven’t found it yet). This 1,000 image limit in practice will only affect galleries you create as interim steps to getting your final image galleries, but if you don’t keep it in mind, it’ll bite you.

Smart galleries have two other limitations you need to be aware of: each gallery can only have five selectors. The logic is also limited to matching either ANY rule, or ALL rules. There’s no capability to do something like (“4 stars” or “5 stars” AND “Elephant Seals” or “Sea Otters”) or more complex logic selections. That a minor thing, though, because you can work around it by creating private galleries that collect things, and then merging them together in the final, public gallery.  By chaining a series of galleries together and hiding them in a private gallery, you can create a smart gallery that does almost anything. It takes a little work and some planning, but ultimately, it’s a very powerful and flexible system.

If you look at the private gallery I use to stage these things, you can see I’ve created a couple of special “collectors” just to tie various keywords together. I then merge them against “all images” to exclude wallpapers, which gets me the images I want.

I did run into one logic bug in smart galleries that created a few pain points for me. They don’t seem to work right if there are multiple “EXCLUDE” rules. For instance, if I wanted to create a gallery of images from “Morro Bay” but exclude the birds. This should work:

• INCLUDE gallery “All Images”
• EXCLUDE gallery “Two Stars”
• INCLUDE  keyword “Morro Bay”
• EXCLUDE keyword “Birds”

Except it doesn’t. you end up with the wrong set because it seems to lose track of the exclusions and returns too many images. The solution for me was to only use one EXCLUDE in any definition, and if necessary, use a special collector gallery to create a set of images, and then exclude those images in a single step in the final gallery. Because of this, that bug’s a minor inconvenience.

One of the potentially useful pieces of data that smart galleries can not access is the star rating, and in fact, almost none of the EXIF data on an image is usable in smart galleries. Instead, you need to set up keywords. I’ve added “2stars”, “3stars” etc to all of my images to give me access to those ratings. This creates a few complications in making sure your data is consistent.

Fortunately, Lightroom to the rescue. In the next segment of this series, I’ll explain how you can set up some checks and balances within lightroom to help you manage your keywords and keep your data consistent without a lot of hassle or pain.

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