Besides being a part time pro photographer, I’m also the fire photographer for my local fire department. I follow them around on many calls and take photos of them providing service to the community.

I thought it would be nice to bundle up the photos I’ve taken for them this past year and present it in a slide show. I started out doing this the old fashioned way and it turned into a big project. I then remember that SmugMug, the hosting provider I use for all my Pro Photography, has a feature called “Smart Galleries.” This allows you to create a gallery and have it contain photos from other existing galleries based on rules or conditions. This was exactly what I needed and turned out to be a great time saver.

For my project I set the following rules:

Include My Photos from 1/1/11 to 12/31/11 AND include My Photos with keyword “sfd” AND Exclude Keyword “art”.

All of that might sound self explanatory except for the last part. When I first created the gallery some additional photo showed up. After one particular call during the year I continued on and took some landscape photos nearby. I forgot to go in and tag these as different. So all I had to do was go into keyword settings for multiple photos on SmugMug and add the word “art” (it could have been any keyword that I wanted to use) and exclude those photos by that keyword.

Obviously for this to work you have to apply keywords to your photos. Years ago I never bothered doing this but I started doing so a few years ago. Even though it adds a few steps to your photo processing workflow, it’s very much worth it. Not only to do what I did above, but also for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also know as “Google Juice” so your website gets picked up by Google and other search engines faster.

In case you’re interested here’s the link to the gallery I created in slideshow format: http://www.dabourphotography.com/photos/swfpopup.mg?AlbumID=20825132&AlbumKey=4dFSgt

Would you like to give SmugMug a try and save $5 on a subscription? Simply enter my email address (dabour at att.net) or use coupon code 2mLQw7wT0DzPU in the Coupon field at the end of your trial. Or you can click on this link: signup.mg-Coupon=2mLQw7wT0DzPU

Thanks for reading!

Dave