Organizing Galleries on SmugMug ...

Update: Shortly after posting this I saw an example that handled the problem of an "All Galleries" page somewhat differently, and later found a tutorial that describes a clever method.  I have it working now, and will post an update when I've worked out more of the kinks.

As part of setting up Time-Light-Distance, one of the first things I did was upload some albums or galleries to SmugMug.

I really wanted to have a single page for all my galleries that was separate from my SmugMug home page.  In order to do this I created a single master category called "All Galleries". Under that are subcategories such as "Events" and "Music" where you will find the actual albums.  In addition I created a separate "Smart Gallery" called "Favorites".  In order to group it with the other subcategories I had to put it in its own Favorites sub-category.

Now there are a few problems with this scheme that will become more evident as time passes.  For one thing, you only get two levels of categories on SmugMug.  So by creating a single top-level category for All Galleries I've wasted one level of the hierarchy -- I won't be able to create sub-subcategories.  This prevents having a category structure like "Travel/Hawaii2009", or "Events/HardlyStrictlyBluegrass2009" which I would use to organize multiple galleries from the same trip or event.

The other problem is that instead of navigating directly to the Favorites gallery, you have to go through the Favorites sub-category.  I could fix this by putting the Favorites gallery directly in the "All Galleries" category instead of in a sub-category.  But then it wouldn't appear with the sub-categories, I'd have to have a separate page element with the ugly name of "All Galleries Galleries".  Bleah!