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| Submitted By: brynn Date: March 12, 2014, 12:44:51 PM Views: 3888 |
| Summary: a copy of the forum topic of the same name |
Hi Friends, Our gallery currently consists of 3 categories -- User Galleries, Tutorials, and Contests. User Galleries: All registered and logged in members have their own user gallery, in which they may create one or more albums. Tutorials: contains 3 albums (at the moment) -- Video Tutorials, Submit Tutorials, and Illustrations for Text Tutorials. Video Tutorials is where you can find approved video tutorials; Submit Tutorials is where new videos should be submitted. Once approved, they'll be moved to Video Tutorials album; and Illustrations for Text Tutorials is just how it sounds -- if you're writing a text tutorial, and you need to include illustrations, they can be uploaded here (if you like). Contests: currently contains only one album, for our first contest, Carnival Mask Contest. Browsing the Gallery Browsing the gallery is more or less, intuituve. But just a couple of tips, because there seem to be a couple of quirks. Click on User Galleries (link) to show the galleries of all our members who have uploaded any content. To open a member gallery, click on the thumbnail image. If you click on the user name, it will open up that member's profile. Once inside their gallery, you'll see that member's album or albums. To enter an album, you can click on either the album name or thumbnail image. Once inside an album, when you click on any image thumbnail, an "intermediate"* sized image will be displayed on a new page, with all the info for that image below it. If the info isn't showing, click "Display/Hide File Info" button, in top, left of display area. At the bottom of the page (below the file info) you'll see the area to post a comment. Note that if the member has disabled comments for that album, you won't see that area. In the top right corner of the display area, are the arrow-buttons ("Return to start", "See previous file", "See next file", and "Return to end"), with which you can browse through all the images in the album. Also top right, is a button where you can report any questionable content to the admins and/or moderators (I think it looks like a paper airplane). The open envelope icon/button is for sending an Ecard (via email). I guess in an era of cell phone email, camera, text messaging, and social networking, it really has very few uses. But it works just fine, if you wanted to use it. The star icon/button allows you to save the image as a Favorite. Access all your Favorites from Gallery tab > My Favorites. To see the image at it's full size, just click on the intermediate image, and it will open in a new window. (If it won't open a new window, that means you're already looking at the full size.) All the buttons have tooltips (which means when you hold your mouse over it, some little text will pop up, identifying the button). So you can explore further on your own. Get Started on Your Own Gallery Your user gallery is automatically identified by your user name. But you can choose the name(s) of your album(s). Here's how to get started. 1. Go to User Tools > Create/Order my albums 2. Click New Album. 3. Fill in whatever you want for the name or title of your album. 4. Click OK. (You can edit the name of your album later, if necessary.) 5. You'll see the name of your album appears just above the last row of buttons. 6. Next you can either click on the green and white icon just to the right of your album title, or Upload File (in the box in the top, right corner of the window). 7. Now you'll see something like you'd probably expect for uploading files, and you can follow the prompts from there. In case you aren't familiar with uploading files: Quote
8. All these fields (spaces) are optional: File title, File description, Date created, Any other special notes about this image. Please only use Keywords if you're sure you know what you're doing. Note that File, File Title, and whatever you put in the File Description space, will show up beneath the image thumbnail, wherever the thumbnail appears. Once you (or whoever) click on the image thumbnail (after it's uploaded), that image's page will open, which contains all the other info, plus some more. 9. If you're uploading an image that was not made with Inkscape (for example, an avatar or other image to use for your album thumbnail) you might want to fill in the File Description that it wasn't made with Inkscape. 10. Finally, click Upload File. 11. If you uploaded anything except SVG or a video, you're done. If you uploaded an SVG or video, you'll need to take an extra step or 2. 11.a. If you uploaded an SVG, you'll need to open it in Inkscape and export a PNG. Next, go to the Intermediate page (the one with all the file info on it) and click Custom Thumbnail button. Then just follow the prompts. In case you aren't familiar: -- Click Browse button -- Select your exported PNG -- Check the box for intermediate image -- Click Upload 11.b. If you uploaded a video, and you'd like to have a thumbnail for it, instead of the default icon, it's the same process as for SVG. Just click the Custom Thumbnail button, and follow prompts. If you have any problems uploading, please either reply here, or post a new topic in Website/Forum Issues board. Now, if you later need to edit any of the info you entered for the image, when you uploaded it, there seems to be 2 ways to do it. For newbies, I would suggest this: My Gallery (box in upper right corner of window) > click on the image. There you'll see a button that says Edit File Information. You can also delete the file from that page. I haven't actually tried the Crop and Rotate button, so I can't comment on that feature. But since we won't typically be uploading photos, I don't see much use for it. For the most part, I guess we'll want to use Inkscape for editing. If you need to edit info for multiple images, or delete multiple images, or otherwise you're not a newbie, you might want to go to My Gallery > Edit Files, instead. For me, it's a little confusing, the way the buttons and info are arranged. But if you truly need to make multiple edits/deletes, it's probably faster on this page. Album Properties The next thing you might want to do, is configure your album's properties. Click on My Gallery > Properties. The first thing newbies should notice is that there's a tiny question mark icon/button  beside each setting. So if you're unsure what to do, click the ? icon/button beside that item, and you can read whatever Help info it contains. Actually, you can find those little help buttons all throughout the gallery. So if you get stuck, look for one of those buttons.Anyway, there in Album Properties, you'll see that you can edit or change the name of your album. And you can write a description for the album, if you like. Unless you know what you're doing, I would suggest leaving the Album Keyword setting alone. Now for the Album Thumbnail. That's the image which identifies your album visually. (Yeah, the first thing I wanted to do, was get rid of that image that looks like a shiny pipe standing on end!) When you open the dropdown menu (below the shiny pipe image) you'll see 3 choices (unless you've uploaded more than one image). So you can decide whether you want your album to be identified by the last image you uploaded to it, or by a random image, both of which will result in a thumbnail that changes, either every time you upload a new image, or every time you (or anyone) looks at it, respectively. If you want to "always" ** show a certain image for the album thumbnail, you can choose which one from the dropdown menu. I decided to upload my avatar (which I did happen to make with Inkscape) to use for my album thumb. If you're using an avatar from the forum's collection, and want to use it for your album thumb, let me know. I can either send it to you, so you can upload it; or possibly I could upload it directly into your album. Anyway, moving on to the Permissions For This Album section. Here you can choose whether you'd like visitors to be able to Rate the images, and also whether you want to be able to receive Comments on the images in this album. I'd rather you didn't password protect your only album, or make it private (by choosing Me Only from the Album Can Be Viewed By dropdown menu). But if you have a public album too, and you're not planning to upload large numbers of images into the private album, you're welcome to make a private album. For example, sometimes I find it helpful to upload an image I'm still working on, to see how it looks as a finished image. But I might not want anyone else to see it. Or whatever reason. And of course, don't forget to click the Update Album button, to save all your settings! Filling Your Albums Now that your first album is set up, you can start to fill it with images. When you click Upload File, you'll see in the top right corner of that page, 2 options in a dropdown menu. If you choose to upload images 1 at a time, you can fill out the Title and File Description, and whatever else you want to fill out, just before each image is uploaded. This may be easier for newbies. Or there's an option to upload multiple images all at once. When you upload several images at once, they all get uploaded first. Then the button prompts will present you with the Edit Files page, where all the images (thumbnails) are, with spaces to fill out whatever info you want to provide. I have to say, I find that page kind of confusing. But you can use whichever method you prefer. After you've uploaded several images, you may want to rearrange their order in your album. I found that after I had 10 to 15 images uploaded, my gallery just looked like a hodge-podge. But, good news! There is a way to have them displayed in whatever order you want, inside your album.
Gallery Themes Like the forum, there are several themes available for the gallery. Only the default forum theme matches the default gallery theme. It would be possible, for someone with more skills than me, to make a matching gallery theme for each forum theme. But it would take a lot of work, and again, by someone with more skills than me (although I may get there someday). So except for the default, the gallery themes have nothing to do with the forum themes. The theme changer appears in slightly different places on the gallery, depending on which theme is enabled. It's quite a small, almost tiny, dropdown menu. But it should show up between the gallery name and the User Galleries section, in all the themes. Note that the Color Style theme has several different color options, some of which are quite bright. But I decided to install it, because there are a few nice ones. You'll see the options between the gallery name and the theme changer. Just click on each color, to see how it looks. All the other themes are just a single theme. Summary OK!! I guess that turned out to be a long read, for an introduction. Sorry for that. In case you should need further assistance, there's an awesome manual http://inkscapecommunity.com/ic_gallery/docs/. However, it seems to be written more for admins. Personally, I find it hard to ferret out info for regular members. But good news -- those tiny question mark icon/buttons that I've mentioned, are available here and there throughout the gallery . If you click on them, they open up those places in the manual that are written for non-admins. A small box pops up in the middle of your screen, to display the appropriate text. Then just click anywhere outside the box to close it.If you can't seem to solve a problem with the gallery, please feel free to reply here, or post a new topic in Website/Forum Issues board. And finally, please don't hesitate to upload your Inkscape images here. The purpose of this gallery is not only to promote scalable vector graphics and Inkscape, but also Inkscape artists. So if you're proud of your Inkscape drawings, show them off! _______________________________ * It will only show an intermediate size if the full size of the image is larger than 700 pixels (width or height). If the image is smaller than 700 px, this page will show the full size. ** The image you choose for your album thumbnail will "always" identify that album, unless you have more than 1 album. I'm thinking this might be a bug. But for whatever reason, once you have a 2nd album, both album thumbnails default to "Last Uploaded", no matter what setting you choose. _______________________________ Edit -- Added "Filling Your Albums" section. Edit #2 -- Added custom thumbnail info, for SVG and video uploads. Edit #3 -- Enabled image ratings in Album Properties Edit #4 -- update misc items |
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) At the bottom of the list are buttons to raise and lower files. Or you can click and drag the 4-way arrow icon/button, and drag the files into whatever order you want.Powered By SMF Articles by CreateAForum.com