Smugmug tip: Feature your favorite pictures

One of the reasons I’m a huge fan of smugmug is because they’ve made it possible for their customers to enhance and extend their web pages.

I wanted to have a gallery on my smugmug site which consisted entirely of my favorite pictures.  One of the ways I could do this was by taking each picture I like, then making a copy of it into a new, “favorites” gallery.  While this would have done the trick it also means having to manage duplicate files and I would no longer have the context of when the picture was taken.  I had to find a better way.

While trying to figure out if there was a good way to do this I stumbled across David’s automatic “recent” featured gallery. The recent gallery used JavaScript to insert a gallery of recent pictures into the smugmug web page.  I realized that with a little massaging the code could instead display a gallery based on a keyword.

I now have the feature I desired: a gallery of all my favorite pictures which didn’t require duplicating pictures and was automatically updated.  Anytime I find a picture I like I simply add the keyword “favorites” and it is automatically included in the favorites gallery. Check out my smugmug site to see it in action.

If you are interested in doing the same thing on your smugmug site, I’ve written up complete instructions and provided downloadable JS files to cut and paste into your smugmug control panel.

Note: I really must give all credit to David for this since I really just trimmed and modified his code for this.