Yes, I answered my own question. Woot!
OK. So I RTFM'ed the Gallery docs again, and think I found a way to categorize my albums without a hack, all through the manager and chunking (not pumpkins
). I hope it helps someone b/c I never even noticed this functionality in the manager before I saw this.
In my RTFMing I noticed the "parent" property on the GalleryAlbums snippet which is described as
Grab only the albums with a parent album with this ID. Remember to set showAll to 0, otherwise it won't work! . That got me thinking that since Albums aren't resources that there must be some way to have albums within albums. I went to the Gallery Manager component and tried to drag one album into another and Eureka! It worked.
That said the parent album can be the "container/category" without any images (or one as the thumbnail for the category listing if needed) with name and description for all other albums within it. Then use the GalleryAlbums call to list all the parents with a different tpl chunk to build a menu and off to the races.
Like I said I've used Gallery for a few years now and never knew albums could be parents of other albums. Maybe this will be helpful to someone else. I'll be sure to post a how-to when I'm done.
