I have been using (and paying for) smugmug for over five years and have previously been very happy with that site.
I need help with customizing smugmug.com; since I am being forced to convert away from the Legacy format which I have used for those five years and which I loved.
I have not found any instructions on how to customize my smugmug.com format to get it like I want it.
I have tentatively selected the ISIS format and want to do the following. However, I am not wedded to the ISIS format and will be happy to use virtually any format…
1. HOME PAGE: I actually like the look of the Home Page because it displays images in their native format. Rectangular formatted images are shown as rectangles and horizontal and vertical formatted images are shown in the formats in which I have saved them to smugmug.com.
I would like to limit or choose the various images that are displayed on this page. I may not want to display certain images. The images that appear on my ISIS Home Page are the most recent images I have uploaded to smugmug. I also have what look like duplicates of certain images saved in my galleries appearing on the Home Page but these are they are not actually duplicates. They could be slightly different crops or processing choices that I have used to link to on various digital photo forums. As an example, the riverboat and polo images above. I would like to select which of these seemingly dupes to display and which not to display.
2. BROWSE: I would like any photos to appear in the format in which I have saved the images and not be forced into a square format. This correct format is displayed in the Home Page but, they are all crammed into square formats on the browse page.
In reality, I like the look of the home page except for the choice of images because it displays the images in the format in which they were saved to smugmug.com but, I think that the browse pages look terrible with the images forced into a square format. I have noticed that many of the smugmug.com sample pages in various configurations try to stick rectangular images into a square format. This gives new meaning to “a square peg in a round hole”. Additionally I have seen smugmug sites of other photographers with their rectangular images jammed into squares. The Legacy smugmug gave me a choice to display my images in a square format or in the format which I uploaded. In all cases, I chose the format in which the images had been uploaded.
3. I would like a place to list my galleries individually, not in groupings like “Pets”, “Travel”, etc. I don’t like having to go the extra step from Home page, to browse page, and then to gallery list page to finally choose a gallery that I want to examine.
4. When I get to the page listing the individual galleries under the groupings, these are again forced into square formats and IMO look absolutely horrible; all jammed up and awkwardly cropped.
I could live with the browse just showing a text listing of gallery types and within the gallery types show text listing of the various galleries…
5. Once I am off the Home page and off the browse pages, my smugmug.com galleries look just about what they looked like in the Legacy version. I am quite happy with this because I always liked the smugmug.com setup.
One problem is that I don't seem to find the arrow which directs me to the last image or first image. The Legacy individual gallery format has single arrows > or < which will advance the selections one at a time. However there are double arrows >> or << which will advance the images to the last or back to the first. I cannot seem to find the double arrows << or >> and navigating through a hundred or so images individually is a lot of work.
If I could find a written tutorial on how to modify this site, I could probably do much of this customization myself. However, since I have not been able to find directions and the site is not particularly intuitive for me, I am asking for help...
However, I do wish that the Smugmug.com "GODS" had deemed it feasible to include the original Legacy style as one of the display options. One of my favorite sayings is, "Change gives the impression of progress but don't fix something if it ain't broke!"
