Categorising photos on my website

[sar-photo]

I am in the process of setting up a new website through Clikpic and I have got to the stage of setting up galleries. This has brought up the problem of how many galleries, what to call them and how to categorise the photographs.

I have decided to have six galleries and the titles are (provisionally)...

In the City
In the Country
By the Sea
Plants and Flowers
Cats and Other Animals
Street

So now to the photographs...

Some of the images I'm having problems with are

a crow flying over Edinburgh - should this go in city or animals?
a pigeon on the beach - should this go in coastal or animals?
a boy walking his dog on the beach - should this go in coastal, animals or street?
a dog in the city - should this go in animals or street?

Argghhh! I find this really difficult! If I only shot one type of subject it would be a lot easier.

I could always set up separate websites for each subject and have images on more than one website 🙄 But that is going a bit too far!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Cheers
Simon

 

[tlitody]

there's no rules that say you can't put an image in more than one gallery

 

[sar-photo]

I know, but I really didn't want to do that. I sort of think that I should go by the main subject, but then some photo's have more than one main subject!

Simon

 

[tlitody]

I don't think it's worth getting too worried about. I'd put any animals in animals if the animal is the main subject. If there's two main subjects then it's maybe a fuzzy concept. You'll work it out.
I'm half thinking of writing a hosting site like clikpic myself. But there would be significant differences which would cover your dilemma. Don't hold your breath though cos it's on the back burner and I'm not sure I want to support hundreds or even thousands of photographers having upload problems or dilemmas over which gallery to put an image in.

 

[sar-photo]

Yeah - I wouldn't want me as a customer either!

Simon

 

[nightfly]

I wouldn't over think it. It's the web, you can always move things later if you decide it's in the wrong place.

I'm not familiar with Clickpic but in addition to setting up galleries, can you use tags? That way you could tag a picture with different terms even if they sit in only one gallery. Then you could do some sort of tag cloud or search feature.

I like the idea of the gallery as a curated experience but like to also give the user the option of coming at your photos from a different way if they like through tags or some sort of feature that lets them explore the images themselves.

On my photo site, I had the idea that I wanted galleries but I also wanted people to be able to discover photos in a less linear fashion. What I did was set up the home page to serve up a different image each time from a group of possible images that I pre-selected. I also put a menu button called "Chance" which basically re-loads the homepage serving up a new image. The idea was that chance and discovery play a large part in my approach to street photography and I wanted to convey that through the site.

I also put in a feature called browse, which serves up every image on the site in a proof sheet sort of format so they can quickly scan them. The order of the proof sheet is also randomized.

This allowed me to serve up a random experience, a curated experience and a self-curated experience.

Maybe too much information but just some things to think about.