How to upload Photos to the Photo Gallery

If you have no interest in setting up an account to enable you to upload your pictures yourself, then that's fine. Just transfer them to a CD or Flash Memory Device and give them to your website administrator, who will happily do it for you. For members who like the idea of doing their own uploading, editing etc read on . . .

Registering Your Account

In order to upload photos to the gallery, you must be a club member, and you will need a registered account.

Click the Register link at the bottom of the Photo Gallery page to register a new account. When your club membership details have been confirmed, you will receive an e-mail confirmation and will be able to login using your username and password.

Uploading Photos

The gallery is organised into separate Albums. Each Album contains a number of photos relevant to a particular subject. Before uploading photos, you will need to create at least one album to put them into. All of the Albums are stored inside a container album named Gallery.

How to Create an Album

Login to your account by clicking the Login link at the bottom of the Photo Gallery page.

Ensure that you are in the container album, Gallery, before creating your albums. Whilst it is possible to create sub-albums from within other existing albums, this is not generally a good idea, because they will not be visible on the main Gallery page.

Click the Add Album link as shown below left.

Setting the Album Properties

Having clicked the Add Album link, the Album Properties can be set as shown below.

Name
This is the name of the directory (folder) that will be created on disk to store the photos.
Title
Set the Title of the album to something meaningful, e.g. Fowey Harbour Paddle January 2009. It's useful to include the date as shown, if appropriate.
Summary
This is optional so leave it blank if not required.
Keywords
This is optional, but if set, the words can be used for the Search function. Multiple words can be added, each separated with a space.
Description
This is optional so leave it blank if not required.

When you have set the required properties for the new Album, click the Create button as shown below.

Adding Photos to the Album

Having created the album, the page displayed below will show "This album is empty, Add a photo".

Clicking the Add a photo link will take you to the Upload page. Alternatively, clicking the Add Items link on the left will do the same thing.

Resizing your photos before Uploading

Photos straight from your digital camera are going to be way too big for the gallery as they are and will need to be resized.

The gallery is set up to handle photos that are 640 pixels wide if the image is horizontal aspect, or 640 pixels high if the image is vertical aspect. The other shorter dimension will be around 420-480 pixels, depending on your model of camera. In order to achieve this resizing you can do one of the following . .

  • Use your favourite photo editing software to create resized copies for upload. E.G. Photoshop Elements.
  • Download and install some free software to achieve the same. E.G.
    • IfranView. This has a Batch Resize feature that works well and is fast. Download here
    • VSO Image Resizer for XP/Vista. Nice and simple to use. Download here
    • Microsoft Image Resizer for XP. Also simple to use. Download here
  • Don't resize them, but upload them just as they are and let the Photo Gallery server software resize them for you. Uploading may be slow due to the large image sizes, and you may find that some images will fail to upload due to server overload, but you can always re-upload any failures.
  • Put your photos on a CD or Flash memory Device and give them to your website administrator for him to upload for you. This is fine because the objective is to get members pictures on the gallery, by one means or another.

Adding photo captions before uploading

If you wish, you can add captions to your photos before uploading them. If a photo has a caption, it will be displayed above the photo when it is viewed full size in the Gallery. Digital photos contain additional information that is embedded in the file as EXIF Data (exchangeable image file format). Using appropriate software, you can add a Description to the EXIF Data Description Tag which will be recognised by Photo Gallery and displayed above the image.

Many photo editing applications will allow you to view the EXIF data and add a description to the Description Tag (including some of the free applications). E.G. Photoshop Elements, ACDSee, IrfanView. There are lots of others if you search for Edit EXIF Software on the net.

You can also add captions when you upload your photos if you use the From Web Browser method shown below.

Uploading the Photos

Shown below is the page you will see when uploading photos. Different upload methods can be used, and the two easiest will explained here.

From Web Browser

This method is fine for uploading a small number of photos at a time. Clicking the Browse buttons will allow you to navigate to a folder on your computer where you can select each photo required. This method has the advantage of optionally being able to add a Caption to each photo.

Tick the Create thumbnails now box before clicking Add Items.

Clicking the More Upload Boxes link will give you additional boxes for more photos.

Upload Applet

This is a Java application so you will need Java installed to use it. It may initially take a short time to load.

Selecting this method will display the page shown below.

Clicking the Add Pictures button will enable you to navigate to a folder on your computer and select multiple photos for upload. You can optionally tick the Show thumbnails if you want.

You can continue to click the Add Pictures button in order to add images from different folders if you wish.

Ticking the Resize pictures before upload box does not seem to reliably produce the correct size images, so don't bother!

When you have selected all the required images, click Upload to upload them to your album.

When the upload is complete, click the link to your album name shown top right of the page (A1 in this example) to view your album.

Having created one or more albums, you can login at any time and add more photos to your albums, or delete photos from your albums.