How to add content to the Gallery

Well by now you should all know that the new gallery module is pretty sweet.

We are offering you vast ammounts of completely free server space for all your pictures and videos, so spread the word and get uploading.

When you go to the gallery you'll see a link called 'Your Album' this takes you straight to your root album on our server.

(All user albums are in the Poiple folder)

From here you can create new sub albums, eg 1 for photos, 1 for videos, maybe one for a special event etc etc etc. Make as many as you like.

Down the left hand column of the page you'll see a drop down list called 'Album Actions' (or image actions, or movie actions etc depending on where you are in your album)

There's lots of interesting things to do here but the one we'll talk about today is 'Add Items', click this to go thru to the upload page.

When you get to this page you'll see a list of tabs at the top, these are all different methods for uploading content, there's some wicked ones in there.

From Local Browser

This is the one that most people will be familiar with. Here you either type in the location of the file on your hard drive eg C:imagesexample.jpg or you click browse and select the image from your hard drive using the standard interface. Then you type in a caption for the file and, do the same as many times as you like, then you can make a few selections as to how the name and caption is stored and displayed and click 'Add Items' to upload to the server. The thumbnails will be generated automatically

From Local Server

This option isn't very useful at the moment. But it allows people to move content from one location on the server into the gallery without the hastle of downloading and uploading it all. This is how i got all the old content from the old gallery into the new one. It works amazingly well for me and is a life saver since i'm currently on dialup. In the future i might give out ftp access to people who have large ammounts of content to upload, it goes to a temporary folder and can be moved manually using this feature.

From Web Page

This is pretty cool. If you have a load of images on a website of your own you can just type in the url and click 'Find Files'. It will go check out all the images there and ask you which files you want to move over to spherculism. This could be really handy if you have a stack of photos and videos you want to shift across.

Link

This just places a link to content on our site or another site. This won't generate thumbs for content on other sites i don't think. But this could be a really good way for us to catalogue all the best spinning videos around. If there is interest we could push this as a group project. Would be great to be able to go to one place and find links to hundreds of great movies. Also this can be used to organise say a load of peoples photos of 1 event. ie every one uploads their festival photos, then i create a folder for a specific event and we link to all the content for that event from within that album.

From Picasa 2

Picasa is a photo organising software that google recently bought. Don't think they orignally developed it. I've not used this method but it seems similar to the local browser option.

Windows XP

This one look interesting, not used it, and don't particularly trust xp to work, but it tells you what to do on the page. It essentially lets you select any image in xp and on the side bar it says 'publish this file to the web' (or something like that) Once it's set up it should be a nice way to do it.

Gallery Remote

GR rocks!!! Definitely a very cool way to upload content. GR is a stand alone program that you install on your pc. Download it from the link provided or from:

gallery remote download

(always virus check downloads) Install it and run it. and follow these instructions to connect to our server.

EEEKK...Just realised that only admin can use this at the moment, damn. Because gallery uses the main system for it's user names and passwords you guys won't be able to login...hmm...we'll try to figure this one out becase GR allows you to just drag n drop files, upload a stack ata time to differnt folders, it will even shut down your pc once it's finished if you like. I'll get back to you all on this.

Upload Applet

The Java Applet is almost as cool as gallery remote, and you can all use it. This is my prefered method. First off, if you don't already have it, you need to get Java installed on your machine.

Download Java

Once this is installed and you go to the Java Applet Tab on the add items page, you'll see a little application start up inside the web browser. If it comes up with a couple of warnings about jpegtran not being installed, don't worry, we'll fix that at some point. All it means is that you cant currently rotate your images on our server.

The best way to use this applet (mini application) is to open up your normal folder browser on your computer, browse thru your thumbnails and simply drag and drop them into the applet (left hand column) Stick as many in there as you like. Then you can go thru and add a caption to each file. Once you're done click 'upload'. I particularly like this method because it tells you exactly how much of each file has uploaded. So you know it's doing something.

Webcam / Live image

The final option is a pretty crazy one. It allows you to link thru to a webcam. Anyone linking to anything unsavoury will be banned!! But this could be a really cool way for us to all get in touch with each other. You can link to your own webcam. Or you could link to some in your town to show us where you live etc etc etc. I like this feature alot, i feel like we could make good use of it somehow, any ideas?

Currently the server only updates the webcam images every 10 minutes, but i can change this if need be. Also the webcam images keep showing themselves up as the newest image, but you can remove an image from showing up in the image block after you link to it by hitting 'image actions' i think.

Anyway, I hope that helps someone somewhere.

Now i'd suggest you go get Java installed and dump a load of your photos and videos onto the sphercular server for us all to see.

I've been thinking we could maybe have some kind of friendly competition. Perhaps like trick of the week, or photo of the week etc. Any ideas?

m