Tim
Life is good Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo

Here I'll be discussing how to quickly get your first collection started and turn it into a gallery! I'll also be explaining what all the options are for a gallery. I'll also touch on what you should expect from a collection verse an article.

Let me first start off with explaining what the terms are. A Collection is exactly that a collection of files, or images that can be used around the internet or just on this site. You also have the option to turn that collection into a gallery to be displayed to everyone. The options for a collection are as follows:

• Collection Name - define your collection i.e. work stuff, 2004 Pictures. Limit 200 characters and is required. It is the only required field.
• Caption - A little more detail to the collection, a base line to get some one to open the gallery. Limit 250 characters
• Filed Under - Tag your collection here. Use comma separated values. So format it like this, minus the quotes: "Spencer,Casey,Ringo,Help". If the tag is used enough it will appear on the sidebar, if not it will just appear on the full tag list. By the way all tags are indexed by Google as is the rest of the site.
• Image gallery - defines if the collection is a gallery or just your personal files/images
• Allow Anonymous - checking this allows anonymous comments to be added to your gallery and images. It's ok to allow this as comments can all be moderated by the collection owner
• Require Comment Approval - when this is checked comments will not appear in the gallery or by aggregated in the side bar until they are approved by the collection owner
• Private - this will allow only site members to access the collection and images
• Is Archive - if you're like me you have a dozen or more collections and do not want to display them all at once. Checking this will remove them form your 'My Collections' list and into your 'My Archives' list. Once in the archive any update to them will not result in the last updated date to be updated. This way just fixing the spelling on a collection will not bring it to the top of the gallery list
• Comments - use this to describe your collection, this is also a free text field with a WYSIWYG HTML designer. So feel free to add some flair to your text and add some images. You can also add Youtube videos to your gallery

Each option also is briefly described in the site it's self. Though not as detailed as above. Also any text that is considered invalid, or harmful will be removed when saving, gotta prevent XSS and SQL Injection some how right. So lets get started.

When you first sign in go to the My Toolbox area and select 'My Collections'

From here you will be given another screen and a link saying Create new Collection. Once you click on that you are given all of the above options. Like so:

Personally I like to fill the form out in the following order; Name, Caption, Comments. Then I'll upload all of the files I want and continue on with Filed Under, and select it as a gallery if that's what it is. So as described above the collection name is a required field so go ahead and fill that in to get you started. Then scroll down the form to the file upload controls. Alternatively you can use the Silverlight uploader to upload you images, you can read up on that here. If you use the multi uploader, go to the bottom and click the save button. I'll define the options for you for the single file upload, these same options apply to the multi file uploader as well:

• File to Upload - this is the file your going to upload
• File Comments - any comments you have about the file. This is editable later so don't worry if you don't comment it now
• Tags - again same as the Filed Under. This is an optional field and from this method of uploading the only way to tag a file currently
• Include in Gallery - this will include the image in the gallery
• Private - marking it as private will hide it from everyone and will not be able to be viewed from the gallery and any tags from it will not display in the tag cloud also the image will never show up in the popular images area
• Default - This sets the collections base image to be displayed in the My Collections area and in the Gallery area
• Slide Show - a work in progress, maybe

If your using the Multi file uploader you'll need to same your work so far so go to the bottom of the screen and click Save. If not, just click the Browse button and find your image, then fill out the options as needed. Once you have at least one file ready to upload click Save and it will upload

After it saves everything your page will refresh and you should be ready to go. If your planning on using the uploader, here's where you start, just click the Upload Multiple Images link on the right hand side of your newly created collection. And as long as you have Silverlight installed you should be all set to follow those instructions. Though as a word of warning if you have Silverlight 3 installed, it may not function correctly. There is a fix in the works for this from the original developer of that wonderful control.

Once you have all of your images uploaded go ahead and fill in the Filed Under, and select the Image Gallery option. You should now be able to navigate to the Image Galleries section and see yours at the top of the list.

In the site there are two distinct areas, Collections and Articles. There are a few other unexplained features that still need some tweaking but that's another topic. While the collections and articles are similar and based out of the same table, they behave differently. If you have a story to tell with a few images that you want to embed along the way, an article is the way to go. Conversely, if you just have a bunch of images that need to be displayed a collection is the way to go.

Also in the article section you have even more options and things to do with your post. Things like syntax highlighting for posting code, youtube videos of course, and even a history of the post to track your changes. It's manual tracking at this point, but will get better with time. You can even attach files to the bottom of the article for visitors to download, useful for documents, and zip files, or even images.

As I've said in the past one of the key features on the site is that all the images are stored in there original state and retrievable as such by the image owner. There is also the generation of 4 different size thumbnail images small, medium, large, and xlarge that can be used all over the internet if you wanted.