Understanding the portfolio

Hi,

Please forgive my ignorance, but I’m struggling to achieve what I would like to do. Let me explain…

I have around 120 photos of our entertainment agency performers. They need to be split into one of 2 types, ‘male performers’ and ‘female performers’. I also need the performers to be split into one of 8 geographical region (i.e. London, The South, The North, East Anglia, The Midlands, Wales, Scotland, Ireland).

I have been trying to use a combination of a portfolio and gallery to achieve this, but I must be misunderstanding which should be portfolio categories, which should be portfolio items and which to display using the layout builder gallery.

I want to ensure I do it the most efficient way, using the least amount of pages but without having too many images and therefore links on any one page (possibly affecting my seo). I want the final selection (for example, ‘male performers in London’, or ‘female performers in London’) to be displayed as an 8 column gallery (as I need to have captions with the perfomer name and details) that then uses the lightbox to display the fullsize image.

The nearest I got to what I wanted was to create 16 portfolio item pages (8 items, one for each area, for the males and 8 for the same areas for the females), with 2 portfolio categories as ‘male performers’ and ‘female performers’ and then create 2 ordinary pages (male performers, female performers) and have a portfolio item limited to its specific category. Each portfolio item page then contained a gallery of those performers.

This seems a really inefficient way of doing it, but I can’t get my head around how best to organise it, or even if I understand the whole purpose of the portfolio items etc.

I also then had to add the code below to functions.php (as advised in a post about using multiple portfolios) just so they didn’t interfere with each other (but I then lost the previous/next functionality with this code addition):

/*

* add multiple portfolio workaround m meaney

*/

add_filter('avia_post_nav_categories', 'use_same_category_filter');

function use_same_category_filter($same_category)

{

$same_category = true;

return $same_category;

}

Can anyone advise me, in a clear way, on how best to achieve what I want? Should I even think about using a separate plugin?