Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (Part 3)

We continue looking at how to set up your lightroom and Smugmug collections to work together in ways that will make your life easier in the future.

But first, a note on limits.

Thanks to a commenter I’ve been told there is a hard limit of 5000 images in a Smugmug gallery. That isn’t a problem for me, but it does help me with a decision I’ve been delaying, which is what to do with personal images — family things that may be in private galleries and in many cases password protected.

The combination of the 5,000 image limit and that the private “all images” gallery being very findable (it’s obscure, not secure) leads me to think that images that you want private need to be in a separate channel. Since you also don’t want those images adding to that 5,000 image limit. So when I decide to put together my “family and friends only” section of the Smugmug site, they’ll be in their own publishing channel with appropriate restrictions.

For me, the 5,000 limit doesn’t worry me. If I ever grow my published Smugmug collection to that size, I can guarantee I’ll have images in that collection that I can un-publish and remove from circulation without missing them. If I ever get to a point where I have 5,000 images where I honestly can’t live without showing off any of them, then I can probably afford to pay a geek to build me a custom site to show them off from the royalties. Whether this limit bothers you or not is something you’ll have to figure out before you decide to implement your Smugmug account like I’ve done here.

Now, onward towards finishing off the site.

As you grow your lightroom library, and as you start doing more with keywords and metadata and taking advantage of that information in your image publishing, one challenge you’re going to have is keeping all of that data straight and accurate.

You can make yourself crazy looking through things and seeing if you can find errors. You can wait until people report them.

Or you can use Smart Collections to build in some error checking and diagnostics into your Lightroom system to help you find and fix problems while they’re small. Smart Collections are your friend.

The “star” problem is a common one you’ll have as you you work on your images. Since Smugmug doesn’t look into your EXIF or give you access to the star ratings in their smart gallery, you have to translate some of that EXIF data into keywords so that it can be seen by Smugmug. I use a set of keywords “1star” “2stars” etc to do this. The trick is to make sure that the keyword version of that data matches the EXIF data.

Over time, I’ve built some “diagnostic” collections that are intended to help me find images that are “out of spec” or where certain sets of data don’t match up with expectation. These collections help me make sure I’m following my processing workflow — have I geo-encoded everything? Do they have captions? Do they have keywords and titles? Have I rated them? This helps me dive into sets of images where I might have missed a step or forgotten something. Note that I haven’t yet come up with diagnostics for “good title” or “intelligent caption”, just the existence or lack of one, but it’s a start.

Over time, you’re going to rethink some of your initial decisions. What if you rated an image 4 stars, then downgraded it to 3? or vice versa? To have that properly show up on smugmug, you have to change the keywords, too. Imagine how much fun that is over time…. Yeah — so if you try to handle it manually, you’re going to find it a hassle. Or you’re in a hurry and decide to update it later, or forget. Then what?

Smart collections to the rescue.

For each star rating, I’ve created two diagnostics. The first one makes sure that if I rated something “N stars” that I’ve also assigned the keyword to them.

The other one verifies that anything assigned an “Nstars” keyword has the appropriate rating.

As long as all of those galleries show zero members, your library is in sync. If one of them has members, you simply select that collection and Lightroom brings them forward, and you can make a bulk change to fix the problem. This also implies that you can ignore the star rating keywords until the end of your processing and then assign them in bulk, meaning managing these becomes almost painless (now, if only Lightroom had macros that would automatically do this for me…).

When you don’t need them, close the folder and they don’t even take up screen real estate. Building in a few of these key diagnostics can go a long way towards keeping your metadata clean and your image collection firing on all cylinders.

As I’ve experimented more with smart collections, I’ve found you can do a lot of things that help you understand your images and your photographic habits.

Want to know which of your cameras you generate keepers with? Or what ISOs you use? Or your lens preferences?

Once you start playing with Smart Collections, you’ll find them a useful tool for peering into your image collection and finding out things about it, as well as finding problems — and even tracking down those images you know are in there somewhere, if you can only find them.

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