Jones Valley

(this helpme article revised 2008-07-11 13:31:43)

The Photo Galleries likely will be one of the most popular features of the Clingman-Jones Family Reunion website. This article will explain how to use the gallery.

Viewing Galleries

That's easy. Under the Top Menu you'll see a Photos choice. Hint -- hold the CTRL key while clicking on any choice will open the choice in a new browser window. That way you don't lose your place in the main part of the site. The gallery images in the right column include a random image that changes periodically, the newest image, the most viewed image, and the most recent album.

Once you click on Photos, you'll see the Main Photo Gallery including the Webmaster's Gallery and the various user albums that have been created. Just click on an album and view away. You'll be presented with thumbnails and clicking on any thumbnail will open the larger image. While viewing the larger photo you will find additional options and ways of navigating through the album. Clicking on the larger photo will close it, allowing you to then select another thumbnail. Some users may have sub-albums.

You can always navigate backwards by clicking on a part of the breadcrumb trail (near top of the main display portion of the page), an example of which is:

Home ... Main Photo Gallery ... guilford ... 2005
and which appears across the top of the content area. In this example clicking on "2005" (the album being viewed) will return you to the thumbnail page. Clicking on guilford will take you to the main album for that user.

Next to each thumbnail is an item actions drop-down box that gives you several options:

• add comment (play nice!)
• print on shutterfly.com (a commercial service)
• view comment
• view slideshow (may not be working depending on your browser)
• view slideshow full-screen (also may not be working ....)

Creating Your Own Gallery

When you register on this site you will have a gallery automatically created the first time you access Your Album. From the top menu click Photos and now (while viewing the Main Photo Gallery) look in the right column, above the gallery photos for the gallery menu. Look for the link Add Album. Click that and the options expand, and you will be looking at your base album ready to create a sub-album. Your sub-album hierarchy might look something like this (using my own as an example):

1. Main Photo Gallery (you can't change this)
   1. guilford (this will be your top-level album)
      1. Reunion Albums (your sub-album #1)
         1. 2005 (sub-sub album)
         2. 2006 Clingman-Jones Reunion (etc.)
         3. Reunion 2007
         4. 2008
      2. My Family (your sub-album #2

You can add items (photos) to your top-level album but you probably don't want to. Think about your overall organization for the future and consider using that as a "master" album and create sub-albums under that. This will allow you to organize your photos in some logical way.

Let's create a sub-album

Select Your Album (if you don't have the gallery menu choices, first select Photos under the Top Menu.

Your first album will be empty. In the right sidebar menu under gallery pick to add sub-album to add your first album. It will be created under your main username album, and you give it a name such as "reunions" in my example. Then complete the fields:

• Confirm: that the album is being created beneath your username, so that the name of the album is coming after, e.g. /guilford/______ in my case.
• Name: Give it a short name per the instructions on the screen. This is the disk name and will not show anywhere.
• Title: something indicative of the reunion year, e.g. '2005' or the activity involved (like "My Family" if you wanted headshots of your family), or anything you wish.
• Summary: short description, e.g. 'Cubage Family 2005'
• Keywords: single words or short phrases that you or others might want to search for later.
• Description: here you can get a little wordy, if you wish.

Click create when done. There is no other setting that you MUST change. Click Back to Album. You'll be back at your main albums screen.

About Using Sub-Albums

All user albums are created as a "sub-album" of the master User Albums. For YOUR account, the choices in the gallery menu will include the ability to create a SUB-ALBUM (which you should do first, like by year or event) and then you can ADD ITEMS, i.e. photos.

Your sub-album can have sub-albums. For example, if you have a sub-album for 2005 and want to segregate photos of the river float trip, make "float trip" a sub-album of the "2005" sub-album. Just don't get too carried away with that.

Adding Photos

Now that you have an album into which you want to add photos, let's add some. For now we assume you want to add photos to a sub-album, and that your sub-album is named "2005" for your July 2005 photos. The hierarchy now is

• Main Photo Gallery
  • Username main album (the one automatically created for you)
    • Your sub-album to receive the photos, e.g. 2005 (in my example)

  You next navigate to your Username main album by clicking on Your Album (that always takes you to your "home base" album. You'll see your list of sub-albums. Scroll down to your sub-album (if you have more than one) but don't click on it. Just be looking at it.

From the drop-down box on the sub-album select add items. You'll see tabs for various methods of adding photos. Select From Web Browser as the method.

This will open a page of File/Caption choices. You simply browse to your files on your computer and select one at a time, then write a caption if you wish. Continue to make selections in the additional File/Caption slots and if you need more, click the more choice and you can add up to 20 photos at a time.

Caution: That upload can then take a while, depending on the speed of your internet connection. Maybe 5-10 minutes on a 256k DSL connection.

The system will inform you when the uploads have completed.

That's the essence of using the system.

Other things you can do

Add captions as you upload, or edit captions later

Make one photo in the album the "highlight" which then becomes the cover to the album

View a slideshow

and more.

Using your photos in a blog

Once you have some photos in an album, you can then do a BLOG entry and EMBED photos into your blog. Look at one of my blogs  for an example of this. When you are writing your blog, look in the WYSIWYG controls (the stuff that looks like a Microsoft Word menu) for the little tree with "G2) above it. That will let you navigate to your albums and pick a photo to embed into your page. Neat, huh?