I have made several references on the home page about gallery restructuring.  I have now completed the task for the present, but now that is done I will be able to concentrate on the Oldham update which will see some changes just regarding photographs that come under that heading.

To understand the restructuring I need to explain the basic structures of Zenfolio galleries.  There are two types of gallery, although to the visitor there isn't really a visible difference between them.  What Zenfolio call galleries are groups of individual image files, whereas a collection is a set of links to images that are held in a gallery somewhere else.  Collections allow the same photograph to be used in several different places reflecting the different contexts in which it can be seen.  One use of collections is when I show latest additions to a subject theme, as updates will usually be located in multiple places and it is an easy way to bring together the new images.

It is of course possible to not use collections at all but instead to upload the photograph multiple times.  However, this is a very inefficient way of using storage and also means that if there is a need to amend the caption, or there is a better scan now available, you have to do it multiple times and there can be a risk of contradiction if the job isn't done thoroughly.  There are occasions when I have done this, when the captions required for different contexts need to be completely different, but this can usually avoided.

When I first started with the Zenfolio gallery in 2011 the initial project was to rebuild the galleries I had previously shown on Fotopic (remember them?).  These were really the Saddleworth galleries which were based on the operations rather than the vehicles.  I therefore created galleries for each route and this worked fine for Saddleworth as it wasn't a fleet gallery.  However, as I created the Pontypridd/Taff-Ely gallery and even more so with the Rhondda one it became apparent that a much better approach was to put the photograph in a gallery related to the vehicle and then in a collection for the route.  Hence the restructuring to convert operations galleries to collections and putting the original photograph in a fleet gallery.  I also quickly realised the best way to do this was to put it in a gallery representing its original owner with any subsequent owners being shown by collections.  Occasionally I have deviated from this rule when the original operator was so obscure (from my point of view) that I considered it most unlikely there would be any more photographs to add to that gallery.

As a consequence I have created a lot more fleet galleries than was the case before and just today have revised the menu bar settings to reflect better the new structure, which does mean that most photographs can be seen in more than one place.  Some galleries have themes applied which reflect the liveries of the vehicles.  This is a time-consuming process and I have limited it to fleets where I envisage there will be a significant amount of new additions and most of the Greater Manchester municipalities, plus PTE and successors, are therefore already done.  Some more will be created in the future when I start adding to the galleries.

One end-result of putting photographs in a gallery representing the original owner is that in fleets with a mixture of vehices purchased new and secondhand, it is necessary to split the fleet into galleries for new vehicles and collections for secondhand ones.  This is a little clunky for small fleets but not really an issue for larger fleet when they are split up into batches anyway.  Unfortunately it isn't possible to have gallery that is also partly a collection.

You will note that for a lot of the new galleries the descriptions are just generic - as time goes by I will gradually work on that as I add something more.  Also, captions for earlier photographs such as those in the Saddleworth Buses section would often make reference to the previous or next photograph.  This would work well in its original route context but not when grouped by vehicle.  Please excuse anomalies like this which I will try to correct, along with some captions which have become very much out-of-date in the time since they were written.  With over 11,000 photos now on site I hope you will appreciate this requires something of a balancing act - if I spend too much time correcting anomalies then I will never have time to add photos.  There is also potential to significantly improve the images for some photos that have been on the site for a while and again this is something I am working on, on an ad hoc basis.

I hope this rather technical blog entry makes sense and explains the way things work.  If I haven't made things clear then please contact me and I'll try to clarify.