Smug Tip of the Week: Use Gallery Styles to Spruce Up Your Galleries
SmugMug’s default look gives you both big photos and thumbnails, but did you know that we have others that you can choose from?
Four, to be exact.
Where to find them 
Look at the top of your gallery and you should see a Style button. Click that to see all of our current gallery styles. Each one is a little different but all are gorgeous! And they all stretch to fit the width of your screen, up to the max size of the photo or the size that you’ve specified.
If you don’t see it, you probably changed your Gallery Settings to stick to one specific style. You can always do this if you don’t want your fans to pick the style, dictating the experience for anyone who visits.
As long as the gallery is set to Viewer Controlled, we’ll remember the gallery style you chose in your browser. It’ll stick that way until you change it again.
1. SmugMug
This is our default, and the one you probably know and love. It’s a great mix between seeing photos big and seeing what else is in the gallery. Click on any thumbnail to switch the pic and click the big photo on the right to open up the lightbox.
2. Thumbnails
People love this style because it’s closest to the proof sheets that traditional photographers are used to. You can click “Show all on one page” at the top and see everything at once, or you can break up the gallery into multiple pages. Either way you’ll be able to quickly preview and click on just the one you want.
3. Slideshow
Our beautiful, buttery-smooth slideshows are a style all their own. The photos will play on their own at three different speeds or you can click a thumbnail at the top to skip to your favorite photo.
4. Journal
The style that takes “juicy” to the next level. It uses the largest photo size you’ve allowed for that gallery and puts it smack dab on the page, leaving you plenty of room to write as much as you wish in the caption field below it. This style looks particularly jawdropping for landscape-shaped photos and panoramas.
Other Styles
As a gallery owner you can use our older, classic styles, too. Those are tucked away in your Gallery Settings, under Look & Feel > Gallery Style. We’re talking about SmugMug Small, All Thumbs, Traditional, Journal (Old), Filmstrip and Critique. We put those there because some Smuggers still love using them, but we won’t be updating them and they don’t stretch to fit your screen, either.
Play around and we hope that you’ll find a style that suits you (and your photos) best.
Enjoy!
Other tricks to easily change up your site:
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Do you have any plans to allow “Journal + Viewer Controlled”? I.e., if a new visitor opens the page images are shown in Journal style but the user can change this if their bandwidth is insufficient or they want to quickly find one picture in a large gallery.
Hi Dominic and that’s a pretty good idea because we love Journal style, but know that it doesn’t suit everyone. Right now the SmugMug style is the default or you can force a different style. Please vote for this on our feedback forum! http://feedback.smugmug.com
Love the smugmug style *except* I wish I could have fewer thumbnails on the left so the image on the right is bigger. Doable?
Agreed, Beth!
Hi Beth, the SmugMug style is designed to stretch to fit the size of your window, so it will automatically adjust to match the best/biggest image possible on the right, then fill the left with thumbnails. But thanks for your feedback! We like to know that there’s a demand for bigger images by default.
Yes, there is a demand for bigger images by default. Of all the styles, I like SmugMug best, but if the viewer is on a small display and/or they don’t have their browser window expanded to something close to full screen, the main image is too small, reducing its impact and getting too much visual competition from the thumbnails.
If the view is set to Slideshow, can the user still download the photo? Where are the controls for that?
Hi Sherri, the Slideshow viewing style is the only style that doesn’t have the download option since there isn’t a lightbox view for images in your slideshow. You’ll have to pick one of the others if you want to offer that option. Let us know if you need any help thinking out a workflow that works best for you and your visitors!
Thanks for the quick response!
I’m using the “steel blue” theme on my site. Is there a way to make it so the entire page is the same color versus having separate boxes for Slideshow, Bio, etc in a different shade (lighter shade by default is what it is)? I’m new to this so pardon me if it is a silly question!
Hi John, no question is silly! You can use your Easy Customizer to change the background of your box colors (Easy Customizer > Boxes > Use Custom Box Background) or you can do this via Advanced Customization: http://smu.gs/ZJvUgg Hope this helps!