Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (Part 4)

Welcome, as we start winding down this series on geeking lightroom and Smugmug.

So, now that it’s all ready to use, what sort of things should we do?

Since so much of what I do is nature/animal and landscape photography, most of my galleries are oriented around displaying animals and locations. When I set up my bird areas, I set them up to match the standard Taxonomic lists that the birders and scientists use. In lightroom, that means setting up a keyword for a grouping, and then nesting the species inside it. In smugmug, you then set up a smart gallery like this.

And what you end up with is this:

For a location, the same:

It’s not always obvious how to break things up. What I’ve ended up doing is using significant locations (like Morro Bay) or in some cases, counties (like Santa Clara or San Mateo County). And for a location like Morro Bay, where I’ve done so much birding, it seemed to make sense to split it up between my bird images and my non-bird images:

Another common use for me is to set up a gallery to use as a slideshow for a specific trip.

I decided to set up some special galleries to focus on specific photographic styles and techniques,like Silhouettes or Black and White images. To do this, just set up the keywords in lightroom and tag the images that fit those styles.

You can do pretty much anything you want in that way: create a folder of specialty keywords in Lightroom for whatever interests you — whether it’s black and white landscapes or pictures that include a person’s left foot. There are no wrong answers, but this is a way to define your interests in any way you want, in Lightroom, and display them in Smugmug via a few matching Smart Galleries.

It is, however, only as good and complete as your key wording and metadata is. And frankly, mine needs some work (but I knew that… and I’m putting some time in a few days a week now that I have a good reason to make it happen)

How about a gallery of your most recent images — but only from a specific publishing channel? I did not want my wallpapers showing up in “most recent”, so the standard one offered by Smugmug didn’t work for me. Instead:

Limit it to 100 images, and set your image sort to “sort by date posted” and “descending”, and the 100 newest images magically show up.

nice thing about this setup: the links don’t break, even after that image is no longer “most recent”.

Or how about my best images? A great use for that “5stars” keyword:

That keyword drives this gallery. The gallery drives the images that show up on the front page of my Smugmug site. And whenever I add an image via the keyword, or decide to downgrade an image when I reconsider, the site reconfigures automatically. No need to remember which parts of the site I need to change.

You can do pretty much whatever you want. Once you start working with it and you get a feel for the capabilities, the options, as they say, are endless.

You might also want to read:

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2. 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...
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4. Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (part 1)   I have been off under the hood of my publishing setup working out the gory details of how to get all of my former...
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