Smug School

Categories, Sub-Categories, Galleries and Photos

Posted on 07. Sep, 2009 by David Wolf.

One of the most commonly asked questions I receive pertains to the three-tiered hierarchy of SmugMug. Namely, Categories, Sub-Categories and Galleries. It’s almost universally mis-understood, and mis-used. So, I’m going to try to explain the relationship of all three levels of the hierarchy.

Let’s start with Galleries. A gallery contains photos or video. That’s it. Nothing else other than photos or video can live in a Gallery. You can not nest a gallery inside another gallery.

Galleries may be placed inside a category and/or a sub-category. What does that mean? Well, if you imagine that I have a gallery called “Paris” (which contains photos from a recent trip to Paris, France), that gallery might live inside the “Travel” category.

So, my hierarchy will look something like this:

• Travel (Category)
  • Paris (Gallery)

So, when a visitor arrives at my SmugMug site, they will see the category called “Travel”. By clicking on Travel, they will be shown a list of all the galleries (but, not the photos) inside the Travel category. Our gallery, “Paris” is one of those galleries. Clicking on Paris, will open the gallery, and the photos can be viewed.

But, if I want to further sub-divide my Paris trip, I would also use sub-categories.

A sub-category subdivides the category. So, in this case, I could have “Paris” as my sub-category and have Galleries named “Art work”, “Architecture”, and “Food”. So, my hierarchy will now look like:

• Travel (Category – No photos here)
  • Paris (Sub-Category – No photos here)
    • Art Work (Gallery – photos here)
    • Architecture (Gallery – photos here)
    • Food (Gallery – photos here)

I can also have galleries directly under the Category; so it would look like this:

• Travel (Category – No photos here)
  • Flags of the World (Gallery – photos here)
  • Paris (Sub-Category – No photos here)
    • Art Work (Gallery – photos here)
    • Architecture (Gallery – photos here)
    • Food (Gallery – photos here)

Ok, confused yet? Here are the rules.

Categories can have Galleries, Sub-Categories, but NO photos

Sub-Categories can have Galleries, but NO Categories or photos

Galleries can have photos but NO other galleries, Sub-Categories or Categories inside them

Think of it like this. Imagine a book shelf in your home. It has 3 shelfs. Those are “Categories”. Next, on each shelf you can have either photo albums (galleries) or boxes (sub-categories). Inside the boxes can be photo albums (galleries). The photos only go in a photo album. So, on the first shelf, you have two photo albums and a box which has three photo albums inside it. The second shelf, you have two boxes (each with two photo albums), and the third shelf has 3 photo albums. All these configurations are perfectly valid. But, I can NOT have a box inside a box, or a box inside a photo album, or a shelf inside a box or photo album.

So, as a hierarchy, this would look like:

• Shelf #1
  • Photo album #1.1
  • Photo album #1.2
  • Box #1.1
    • Photo album #1.1.1
    • Photo album #1.1.2
    • Photo album #1.1.3
• Shelf #2
  • Box #2.1
    • Photo album #2.1.1
    • Photo album #2.1.2
  • Box #2.2
    • Photo album #2.2.1
    • Photo album #2.2.2
• Shelf #3
  • Photo album #3.1
  • Photo album #3.2
  • Photo album #3.3

And that, above, is as complicated as you can *ever* get. Three levels. Shelf, box, album.

Was this helpful? Did it suck? Let me know below

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