Earlier this month I was asking many questions after deciding to move my images to SmugMug. I have over 6,000 images to post and knew it would be a lot of work. Many of you might think I put too many image online but that is a way I keep track of them.
It certainly was a lot of work. I had to think of the design I wanted and then had to figure out a hierarchy. I ended up with 3 categories (folders) plus favorites. Inside each one were galleries and/or more nested nested folder with galleries inside of them.
I wanted to use my Lightroom images so I could use the LR SMugMug plugin which would make changes easy (once it was set up.) I was then faced with importing all my pre 2014 images into my LR catalog. To do that I had to go through all of those images and cull out the ones I did not want on SmugMug.
(Still with me?) I then reorganized the structure of my LR catalog so that it corresponded to the galleries and folders on SmugMug. I had to add keywords, titles, and caption on all the old images. (I did a poor job on that.)
The plugin would upload all files but I just wanted to upload the finished tiff files (converted to jpg as they were uploaded) so I moved all my raw files to 3 folders to correspond with the 3 main folders on Smug.
Uploading took forever and a day. Checking discovered many mistakes. Looking at thumbnails I put some terns in with gulls, I forgot titles and/or keywords. There must be mistakes still there but I am set to rest.
When I started the process i did so because my old site was a real pain to update. Changing even 1 image meant regenerating code and uploading the entire catalog minus the images. Even there eI had to prepare images - resize, change to jpg, add watermark.
As I worked though, I began to like SmugMug more. I could change many options on the fly - image size, watermarks, gallery descriptions. I had started my old gallery with 700 pixel images, and there was no way I could change that without major overhaul. The old site had a better look (IMHO) than the new site, but navigation is better on Smug. Also, the thumbnails on the old site were so small (100 pixels) one had to click on one to see the image with any detail. On SMugMug the thumbnails are much larger (which I though ugly at first) that someone can enjoy just looking at them and only click on the few that interest them.
My brain is too fried after think of other pluses and minuses at the moment. I am glad I am done.
It certainly was a lot of work. I had to think of the design I wanted and then had to figure out a hierarchy. I ended up with 3 categories (folders) plus favorites. Inside each one were galleries and/or more nested nested folder with galleries inside of them.
I wanted to use my Lightroom images so I could use the LR SMugMug plugin which would make changes easy (once it was set up.) I was then faced with importing all my pre 2014 images into my LR catalog. To do that I had to go through all of those images and cull out the ones I did not want on SmugMug.
(Still with me?) I then reorganized the structure of my LR catalog so that it corresponded to the galleries and folders on SmugMug. I had to add keywords, titles, and caption on all the old images. (I did a poor job on that.)
The plugin would upload all files but I just wanted to upload the finished tiff files (converted to jpg as they were uploaded) so I moved all my raw files to 3 folders to correspond with the 3 main folders on Smug.
Uploading took forever and a day. Checking discovered many mistakes. Looking at thumbnails I put some terns in with gulls, I forgot titles and/or keywords. There must be mistakes still there but I am set to rest.
When I started the process i did so because my old site was a real pain to update. Changing even 1 image meant regenerating code and uploading the entire catalog minus the images. Even there eI had to prepare images - resize, change to jpg, add watermark.
As I worked though, I began to like SmugMug more. I could change many options on the fly - image size, watermarks, gallery descriptions. I had started my old gallery with 700 pixel images, and there was no way I could change that without major overhaul. The old site had a better look (IMHO) than the new site, but navigation is better on Smug. Also, the thumbnails on the old site were so small (100 pixels) one had to click on one to see the image with any detail. On SMugMug the thumbnails are much larger (which I though ugly at first) that someone can enjoy just looking at them and only click on the few that interest them.
My brain is too fried after think of other pluses and minuses at the moment. I am glad I am done.
