When to create gallery sub-sections?

[cutiebunny]

How many items do you feel is a "good" amount before dedicating a section of your gallery to it? In other words, let's say that you collect from a particular show, but want to group your items by character. How many visible cels/sketches do you feel is necessary before it receives its own section? 1? 2? 3? 4 or more? Why do you feel this way?

-----

I was debating this question the other day in light of several recent convention acquisitions and wondering how many sections I wanted to have in my gallery dedicated to a singular artist. As is, I have a section each for original artwork from Anime, Manga and Video Game/Eroge artists, as well as a couple sections dedicated to a specific artist if I have several sketches from them. But while having one section dedicated to each main genre is great at keeping the main page of my gallery clutter-free, I wonder if anyone really wants to scroll through several examples of one particular artist, and instead would prefer if I gave prolithic artists their own section instead of grouping them together with the others.

I guess, for me right now, my magic number is 4. Once I hit four sketches, I create a special section for that particular artist. But I don't know if I should continue with this number, or just lump them altogether. I realize that it's my gallery so there is no right or wrong answer here, but I would like to prevent others from having to scroll halfway down the page to get past the original artwork section if they're not inclined to visit it.

Thoughts?

[sensei]

I guess I have two somewhat interconnected principles. One is that I don't like any individual gallery to grow past 24 visible images without some kind of clear reason for keeping them together (such as being all part of a single episode and organized chronologically). The other is that I like some kind of clear organizing principle for a new gallery, along with an ongoing commitment to continue adding to it.

For a new series-oriented gallery, I say "four" visible pages (which could mean showing more than four items, using the thumbnails, if it's sketches from a CGI series). For an episode-oriented gallery, I'd opt for more pages PLUS the advantage of keeping closely related cels/sketches together that otherwise might be scattered in different galleries. For a character-oriented or theme-oriented or medium-oriented gallery, it's more the first principle: a gallery has gotten too big and I'm looking for a logical way to divide it into two smaller galleries of about equal size.

But it all has to do with keeping the whole collection simple and inviting to browse. The disadvantage of having more galleries is that the home page gets more and more cluttered and disorienting. Galleries that have more cels in fewer galleries are more inviting. But the disadvantage of that is that cels/sketches on the "back pages" (6 and above) are less and less likely to ever be browsed. Most of my gallery can be visited by making two clicks from the home page. But that puts more pressure on me as a designer to encourage people to take a deep breath and start clicking. Hence the "Featured Cel/Sketch" and "New Arrival" images/links in the left column.

Just my 500 yen. Let's hear from others. Thanks, CB, for an interesting question!

[kungfulkoder]

My answer would be that the idea of having galleries (aka folders) is in itself not ideal. Instead, it would be better to have a site that works off of tags. So, take http://dreamland.rubberslug.com/gallery ... mID=366875 for instance. The following tags could apply:

• Record of Lodoss war
  Record of Lodoss war:OVA
  Deedlit
  Yutaka Minowa
  Genga
  Smiling

As a user of the site, I can search for Deedlit+Genga+Smiling to get every genga on the site of that character smiling. I could then see someone with a particularly interesting collection, and search for "user:sensei" to see what they have.

This is a pretty common divide on picture hosting sites, the folder oriented vs meta-data oriented view. Unfortunately, I don't see a driver for any cel/genga focused site with substantial users having any momentum to move in this direction.

[ReiTheJelly]

I'd say my limit is 3 pieces. But I only create subsections if the main section is getting overly crowded, or if I feel the division would help visitors view the items better.

[graymouser]

For cels, I start a new section once I have 3 items from a particular show. Until I hit that 3 cel mark, they are kept in my miscellaneous section. In general, I have not divided up my sections beyond show. The only exceptions are FY (TV and OVA due to different authorship) and CCS (characters and card spirits due to size - 57 cels combined).

Otherwise, I do not have a maximum. My largest single section is VHD, Bloodlust with 40 items. The problem with dividing this section into smaller parts is that I think it would be awkward. With only 2 exceptions, I set a maximum of 3 cels on any one character (counting transformations as separate characters). Once I cross that mark, I sell/trade one of the extras. Dividing VHD, or any other show, by character would result in a pretty high number of sub-galleries, each with only 1-3 cels. VHD is a single movie so dividing it up by episode would not work either. In some cases I have subdivisions based on page; such as TV on the first page and OVA on the second page or antagonists on one page and protagonists on another. Some pages are divided using random factors such as color scheme. None of these "subdivisions" are individually accessible from the main index page. With a cel index already numbering 41 sections, links to additional subdivisions would make this page even more bulky.

Okay, I am rambling a bit. Anyways, I am not sure there is a single best way to divide up a gallery. I think a lot depends on your collecting style and preferences.

[teppy]

We're essentially talking about information architecture here. The challenge of information organization is one that librarians grapple with - think card catalog, umm, those don't exist anymore, so online catalog One guideline to use is the rule of progressive disclosure in navigation; don't overwhelm the user with too many top level choices. Instead, group information into general subject categories and then offer more focused navigation further down in the category. Of course, Rubberslug essentially only allows for two levels of navigation - the main category and then the detail page for each cel, so it doesn't work so well.

My gallery is very small, so I don't have a lot of top level categories. I organize by series title, not character because I don't have a bazillion cels. However, I think I have too many categories that only display one cel, and I was thinking about just having a "Miscellaneous" category for those items. But then comes the issue of labeling. I feel that my "miscellaneous" items would be lost to the prospective browser of my gallery if I labeled the section as such....

Interesting subject. I'm looking forward to more responses.

[Rekka Alexiel]

I recently went through this dilemma with my Senritsu gallery. At first I didn't have many sketches from it, but after a while keeping all sketches in one section added on too many pages to scroll through, especially when many items are somewhat lengthy action sequences. I remedied this by separating items according to character or character groupings. This cut back on the number of pages in each sub-category although it means each viewer has to manually switch between categories to see everything. For me, I like the organization; it fits well and I managed to format the gallery list on the main page somewhat okay--I still would like more control over this in the future!!

As for other areas in my gallery, I generally organize items by clusters of episodes. This is easy to do with B't X Neo OVA because there are only 14 episodes, so each sub-category gets between 3 or 4 episode's worth of goodies--and it's easier to do this because of the sheer amount of items in each category...!!

My current dilemma related to this lies with my Gulkeeva sub-categories. I have relatively few in the Episode 1-8 & Episode 9-16 sub-categories, but it just EXPLODES for the last category for eps 17-26. The obvious conclusion is to create another sub-category to split up these episodes, but it becomes a huge pain when I also organize items chronologically within each section. Getting the order wrong is a HUGE fear of mine since it has taken me YEARS to ID everything and put them all in the correct order as they are now (I sometimes fear what would happen should RS suddenly disappear along with all of this sort of information...!) But although it is a major pain to go about dividing an expanding sub-category, it's very nice after the fact. Hmm, I was just updating images in this area last night... I might as well work on this now, too......!

Now, all of this is mostly related to my top--and very large--galleries, not for the other single title areas in my gallery. For those I tend to keep them organized purely by show, even if the number of items pushes things onto a 2nd page. I'm okay with having a gallery with very few items as long as it's consistent with the rest of the organization in the gallery and that it makes it easier for people to locate items from a specific series.