Jim Schrempp - A guy living in Saratoga, California - a small city at the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. We get a bit more rain than San Francisco, but ten times as much sun. my web site
I've been exchanging emails with a few non-technical friends who are trying to use my gallery installation. As they come up with questions I'm documenting what I send back here. Eventually I will check whether this info should go into the codex. For now, please don't give me any grief over what you see here.
It is not the easiest process I have encountered. Still using dial-up, it took 45 minutes to download the Java runtime thingy. Then when I tried to add photos to the little screen, the applet unloaded my whole "My Pictures" folder into the upload window. I have several sub- folders in My Pictures and I could find no place to remove stuff from the upload window. I logged out and started over. Somehow I managed to get to the subfolder I wanted but could not figure how to drop and drag selected photos I wanted, so highlighted them by twos and threes at a time.
I had captions for each in another file which I tried to copy and paste into the captions window, but that didn't work for me, so I went ahead and uploaded the pictures thinking I could add captions later by editing each photo from the gallery pages. Tried one but it didn't appear below the thumbnail.
After a total of over an hour tying up my phone line, I gave up, logged out, and closed my Internet connection. I'll try again later.
As far as I am concerned the applet method is too confusing. Some of the pictures are not in the order I want them thus making the adding of the right caption to the right picture difficult.
Note, on a dial-up connection the Java applet can take 45 minutes to download.
When you run the upload applet there are at least two ways to add files to its "upload" list. If you click on the "add pictures..." button, a normal MSWindows file selection dialog should appear. There you can use click, shift-click to select a range of files, or use click, control-click to select individual files. The other option is to bring up the windows file explorer and the upload web page at the same time. You should shrink the two windows so that they are both visible on the screen. In the windows file explorer, select the ones you want then click and hold while dragging them over the "list of pictures to upload" section. Release the mouse button and the files should be added to the list.
In either case, if you have selected a folder then all the files in the folder and all its sub-folders will be added to the upload list.
The upload list can be edited too. You can select file names and then press the Delete key to remove them from the list. You can also drag and drop within the upload list to change the order, but this is not the best way to reorder images - as you noted, if some have a problem then uploading them a second time will add them to the end of the album.
When you are ready to upload you click the "Upload" button. This brings up a small dialog that shows the progress of the file upload process. If there's an error it will show up here and that file will remain in the list for upload when the process completes. You can then click the "Upload" button again to give it a second try.
Overall... we might have to conclude that this isn't going to work over a dial-up line. That is a shame. If you want to experiment I have one idea. If you or a friend has one of those key-fob USB storage devices - they cost about $25 for 250MB - you could try moving the pictures to upload on to that. Then use a PC in the local library for uploading. The library PCs might have their security settings in such a way that it doesn't allow the upload applet to work, but it might be worth a try.
Once the files have been added to an album, then the gallery page should offer you two choices on the left hand menu bar: Rearrange Items and Reorder Items. Rearrange is the best one to use. When you click on this link small thumbnails of all the items will appear. To change the order you click on one item, which selects it, and then click on the item you want it to come before. The little thumbnails will immediately change to reflect this new ordering. Once you have done many moves like this, then click the "save" button at the bottom of the screen. The Rearrange Items page will refresh with the new order. At the top you will see a message that your changes were accepted. You can Rearrange more items or use the link at the top to go back to the album. The items should now be in the new order.
To change the description and such, you can click Edit Photo in the drop down box under the photo. Another option is to go to the item page and select Edit Photo link on the left hand menu. However, if you are going to make a lot of updates there is an easier way - On the album page select Edit Captions on the left hand menu. This brings up a page where you can edit the descriptors of several photos at the same time. Buttons at the bottom of the page allow you to "save and edit next set", "cancel", etc.
As to what gets displayed, this can be confusing. To help sort this out, I added one photo of my own to the beginning of your album. I put "title" in the Title field, "Summary" in the summary field, etc. By navigating around you can see which descriptors get displayed where. Please delete this photo when you are done.
