Thumbnails and categories

[DimitrisK]

I have a client whose site is about 500mb and has 1000s of images--it's art licensing. I want to use the enterprise version of the software because this site grows 100s of pages each month. My problem is how to get the thumbs to show when there are multiple categories e.g. Category 1, Category 2, Category 3 and each category has its own pages and folders.

It's not possible to use meta tags so how could it be done so the pages would automatically pick up images for thumbs. Would I have to create a thumbs folder in each category or something like that?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks. I'm referring to using V.6

[Ray]

(I moved your thread to the V6 forum. You posted it in the V5 forum originally).

You are not quite clear as to what you mean by a Category, or why this would be a problem for your thumbnails to show. You also did not explain why you cannot use the ZOOMIMAGE meta tag.

You should first have a read through the currently available settings and see what suits:
Q. How do I associate images with my search results?

Thumbnails can be determined based on the path and filename of the page/item. So you could potentially have "thumbs" subfolders placed and named accordingly so that they can be automatically determined based on your settings.

[DimitrisK]

Raymond,
Thank you for your reply and I apologize for the ambiguity of the original post.
As far as the "categories" I talk about above, here's how it's set up. Basically there's a gallery with about 10 different artists located in a folder called Fine_art_Folder. Each artist has his own section (what I call category) in a separate folder. So there are individual folders with each artist, e.g. artist1, artist2, artist3, etc. In addition, there is a folder, root level, called Photography, that has pages with photography graphics and so on.

Now each artist folder, has multiple folders containing their files, pages, etc. For example, artist1 folder has all the files associated with the artist (e.g. ./fine_art_folder/mori_pages) with the exception of the images. All the images for all the artists, and photography section are in a folder called Images (e.g. ./images/art_weee_folder and ./images/art_photo_folder) .
So if I want to automatically have the search engine pick up the images, how would I do it? Is it possible. Here’s the link www.studiovoltaire.com

The reason I can’t include meta tags is that there are already thousands of .html pages done. So what do you think?

[Ray]

Did you look at the link given above? Most relevantly, this sub-section:
Q. How do I associate a thumbnail with an image for my search results?

It helps if you know what features are available so we can address them directly to come up with an acceptable solution.

Looking at this page on your site:
http://www.studiovoltaire.com/fine_art_folder/watson_pages/pages/Gallery01/Coastal_Jewel_07.htm

The thumbnail for the page appears to be here:
http://www.studiovoltaire.com/images/art_watson_folder/coastal_jewel_07_th.jpg

Frankly, your naming scheme is not very well selected to allow for auto-determination, and the two URLs are too different to do this easily.

The settings Zoom provides allow you to determine a URL that is relative to the first, but your second URL is actually dependent on the naming of the first (due to the "art_xxxx_folder" name changing depending on the "xxxx_pages" folder name in the first URL).

If you see the thumbnail option described in the above FAQ, you will see that it would have been possible if your thumbnails were hosted via a static relative path from the page, for example:
http://www.studiovoltaire.com/fine_art_folder/watson_pages/images/Coastal_Jewel_07_th.jpg

Which would seem to me a much more logical location. Then your thumbnail settings can have a URL of "../../images/" with "_th" specified after the file name and Zoom would have been able to automatically point to them.

[DimitrisK]

Raymond,
Thanks for the detailed response. Basically, what you're saying is if I create an (images) folder for every category as in your example(http://www.studiovoltaire.com/fine_art_folder/watson_pages/images/Coastal_Jewel_07_th.jpg) and then name the thumbs accordingly it'll work. Right?

I just have to make sure that the thumbs are identically named as the pages and the Images folder for them is located in the same folder as the pages.

thanks for your time and help

[Ray]

Yes, the example thumbnail URL above can be automatically determined if you setup the thumbnail options accordingly as described in my previous post.