Photo Album

The ExSite Photo Album tool allows you to easily manage and update albums of images.

An album is just another word for a library. We call them albums here because we expect them to contain primarily web-ready images, whereas a regular library can contain anything, including documents or other files that the Photo Album tool cannot work with. The Photo Album tool will ignore any files it finds that are not images, so if you open a regular library, you may find that there is nothing for you to work with. In these cases, the Website Manager or possibly the Document Manager may be more useful for working with those libraries.

Getting Started

Start the Photo Album tool by clicking on the Photo Album icon, which looks like this:

First you must choose which website you are working with, using the drop-down selector.

Album Selection

Once you have selected a website, a list of all of the libraries in that site appears on the left side. (Note: not all of these are necessarily photo albums.) Select a library to work with by clicking on its name.

To create a new album, select the New Album link at the bottom of the list of libraries. Provide an album title, an optional description of the album contents, and a publication directory name (which should be a short text string with no spaces). The title and description are normally used at the top of your photo galleries or slide shows.

Album View

When viewing an album, your images are shown on the right side, as follows:

update
caption
thumbnail
delete
thumbnail
(click to view)
This area holds a detailed description of the image, including name, caption, and file info.

Click on the thumbnail to view the image at its full size. You may see extra messages. "Missing Thumbnail" means that the image does not have a natural thumbnail, and so we are scaling the original image down in the browser. This will make your images load more slowly if you are using thumbnails. It will have no effect if you aren't using thumbnails at all. "No caption" means that the image has no caption, which may or may not be a concern.

The buttons on the left side of the image thumbnail can be used to update or modify the image:

update Use this to update the image (upload a new image file), or change the caption or thumbnail settings.
caption Use this to enter (or edit) the image caption. Captions may be used automatically by some tools, and ignored by others, so they are entirely optional.
thumbnail
Use this to re-do the image thumbnail.
delete Use this to delete the image from the album. (Images are moved to the trashbin, so you can recover them there if you make a mistake.)

At the bottom of the image listing are additional options:

update Use this to add a new image to the album.
caption Use this to upload up to 10 images at once into the album, with the same scaling and thumbnail settings.
thumbnail
Use this to re-do all of the thumbnails in the album.
delete Use this to publish the the album. After changing any images or adding new images, you should always publish the album. Failing to do this may cause your images to load too slowly, or not to update correctly (since the previously published version may be used instead).

Resizing Images

When you upload image files into your albums, you will be given an option to scale them. This is useful if your images have not been prepped for display in a web page, because original images are often much too high resolution for web pages. If your images have come directly from a digital camera, scanner, or other high-resolution source, it would be a good idea to scale the image when you upload it. There are six options:

If you are not sure, there is usually no harm in selecting the most appropriate option. If the image already meets that size criteria, it will not be modified.

Thumbnailing Images

Thumbnails are miniature versions of your images, which are very useful when creating photo galleries. They allow the viewer to easily preview the entire album, without incurring the cost of downloading every image in full. Whether or not you need thumbnails depends on how big the images are to start with, and how you are intending to use them. If your images are small size to begin with, then the savings are minor. If you aren't using thumbnail previews at all, then the savings are irrelevant. If you are unsure, there is no serious harm in making thumbnanils, other than a minor increase in storage requirements.

Normal thumbnails scale the image down to a maximum of 100 pixels tall or wide. Normal thumbnails preserve the entire original image and image shape. If your images vary in their shape, however, this can sometimes make thumbnail galleries look sloppy or irregular. Square thumbnails scale the image down to a 100 x 100 square image. This can crop the edges, possibly removing important parts of the image. However, since all of your thumbnails are the exact same shape and size, they may align better in thumbnail galleries.

You can also choose not to make thumbnanils. This option may be preferred if the images are already small enough to serve as their own thumbnanils, or if there is no chance of actually using image thumbnanils in your intended usage. You can always come back later and re-do the thumbnails if you change your mind.

If you change your mind about how some or all of your images were thumbnailed, you can re-do all of the thumbnails in the album the same way using the link at the bottom of the album view.

Tips For Making Web-Ready Images

Displaying Your Photo Albums

The Photo Album tool is mainly used for managing the contents of your Photo Albums. There are numerous ways to display your albums:

If you insert the PhotoAlbum web application into a web page, it will redirect to the Gallery web application.

For Galleries and Slideshows, you can add additional options to the parameter box, to further control how the albums are displayed. Each parameter takes the form:

name=value

and multiple parameters are separated from each other with a semi-colon ";", for example:

name1=value1;name2=value2;name3=value3

The parameter names and values that are accepted are:

Example: These parameters tell the SlideShow web application to display the "summer-vacation" album, including the album title, no borders around the images, and black control buttons:

name=summer-vacation;title=1;border=0;button=black