Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Linking to URLs on SmugMug

Lately I have seen a lot of broken 'other photo' url links in SmugMug DailyPhotos picture captions due to them containing the pound sign (#) in them.  I'm not going to delve into why that happens.  But suffice to say, if you paste a url into your daily photo comments that contains a pound sign, clicking on it fails, and folks have to copy/paste the link into another browser window to go to your linked picture.

Example of a url that breaks:
http://fotomom.smugmug.com/Nature/January-2012/20844772_Mzb9HP#!i=1661913395&k=67SgMJs

If you are willing to turn on the Share option for your gallery, you can use the 'Get a Link' option or the 'Shorten this Link' option to get around this.  In my blog each day, I use 'Get a Link' and put the Small version in my post using the Link icon on blogger.  That lets me specify the text of the link  If you use 'Shorten this link', you still see a url but it is as you guessed.much shorter. You can past it just like that or use the Link icon with it too.

Get a Link:



Share a Link:




If you just don't want to turn on the Share option, or your link is not SmugMug related, you can still format a pretty link for a url yourself.  The HTML behind the link is pretty simple:  It all boils down to an HTML tag that looks like this:



(Do you have any idea how hard it is to put an HTML tag in an HTML document so it will show up just as text?  Grrr....  I had to put it in as an image file:-)

You can replace the url with your url (the one on the browser bar for your picture) and then replace the wording for the link (SmugMug in this case) with your desired text.  Be very careful not to mess with the double quotes on left and right carrot symbols (<>).

Link to the pictures in this post.

I hope this is helpful.  E-mail me or leave a comment if you have questions.  For me, it's all about which one of these methods is fastest since I do this a lot and am trying not to be too lazy to format things so they are easier on the eye.

No comments: