Navigating the SmugMug Gallery

BarrettPhoto images are primarily shared through our web site hosted on SmugMug.  SmugMug is wonderful and all, but the gallery pages can be a bit confusing.  It has a lot of controls to access various pieces of information.

The image at right shows a typical gallery view with all of the controls as presented on the web site.

This post attempts to clarify what the controls actually due.

EXIF Image Rating

Image ratings are essential to my work flow and management of my Smug Mug photo galleries.  Using that data in a consistent way is important to me.

EXIF is short for EXchangeable Image file Format and can be used for storing quite a bit of text information with or inside of a data file. EXIF typically stores image capture time, identification of camera and lens and many other optional fields.  This posting delves into my use of the Rating field.  Which is really nothing more than a very short integer limited to values of 0 to 5.  Those values are often represented as a count of stars (⭐️) to show a rating.

Menu Button Control Based on Screen Size

I posted previously on my experiences customizing my web site.  There was one nagging element that I wanted to change and I now have completed
it!   I wanted to have minor menu choices, like About and Search available, but not distracting.  For me, that means not appearing as word buttons in the top menu, but rather sitting in an unobtrusive page bottom bar.  That bottom bar becomes obnoxious on small screens, so I wanted it to disappear and the choices appear in the drop down menu on those small, typically smart phone, displays.

Below is menu/title bar I am using on all of my pages on large screens.  I have the button choices cut down to my minimum.

Customizing My SmugMug Web Site

Not surprisingly, as soon as I had a workable web site up on SmugMug, I've been hit with an irresistible urge to make it more customized.  Just some minor tweaks that would make it more precisely what I want it to be.  Since I've never coded in HTML/CSS, I need to do some learning.  As I do that learning I am making discoveries that I seem likely to forget all too quickly, so I'll write down some of them here where they can be found again without extensive googling or pestering my children.

Crafting a Photo Web Site

Recently, I've been feeling the need to have my own photo website. Somewhere that I can place images and point people to see them.  Specifically, this has been driven by my Photo Memory Book habit and group trips we have gone on with one of our college alumni groups. I've been making my own photo memory books for years, offering them to my fellow travelers seemed easy and something they might like.  So far it's turned out that they pretty much love them and I receive lots of interest and more photos that I can use when building my books.  All of those images just demand sharing, a photo web site seems a natural solution.