Managing Your Gallery
Photos and images added by members of Footnote serve as the life-giving force that keeps the Footnote community running. Without historically relevant and memorable images to share, the options for viewers and members of the site become limited. Photos and images in personal galleries of members make it possible for the rest to make comments, annotations, spotlights, as well as enliven their story pages.
As a member of Footnote, aside from managing the specs and preferences on your account and your personal profile, you have the power to manage your gallery. All the photos you upload on Footnote can be more organized and sorted out depending on your preference. Remember that managing your gallery helps you with your data more efficiently, as well as helps other members whenever they perform search queries.
What is in your gallery?
Your gallery should contain all the photos you have uploaded, and you have the option of arranging them alphabetically, or by date of uploading. Furthermore, you may also have photos in your gallery which you have obtained from other members of Footnote, or from the free historical images collection of the National Archives. You will learn more about downloading images from the Footnote website in another tutorial, "How to Print and Download Images."
To open your gallery, ensure that you have already logged in with your username and password. On the Footnote homepage, click on the link labeled, "Your Gallery" which is found in the top right corner of the page. As you open your gallery, you find the images you have uploaded, along with other images you have downloaded from Footnote.
You can change the view of your photo thumbnails by list view or grid view. There is also an "Arrange" button to help you sort out your photos by date or according to your preferences. To switch views from all photos to images from Footnote and from your uploads, simply click on the links in your gallery.
How to organize photos in your gallery
You can actually create collections on the images of your gallery. A collection can serve as a mini-album where you can further categorize your photos based on date, place, persons included, and others. To be able to create a collection, simply click on any image in your gallery, and drag to the upper left box with the dotted edges. Any images you drag in here will be placed in your collection.
To modify the name of your collection, you can click on the button named "Add image to." After this you can denote a name for your collection. Choose a good name that helps you recall how you organize your photos. Take note that you can place one photo in more than one collection, depending on how you want to arrange them.
Recall the tutorial on uploading images, so you can choose images from your personal collection of the appropriate image sizes. You have are only limited by what photos you want to place. You can have as many as you like, and create as many connections between photos as you prefer. You may check the "How to Make Connections" tutorial for additional info.
Ideas for organizing your gallery
- As discussed previously in the topic "How to Upload," you may use a scanner or digital camera to create the digital form of your image or document. Aside from that, you can also solicit the help of photo editing software so that you can make parts of your image brighter, cleaner, sharper, and easier to view.
- Be sure your images are appropriately sized for uploading. Most scanners and digital cameras have a default photo size of 1000kb or more. Reduce these by having an image resizing software modify your photos to 100kb or less. You may also crop photos if you think they are too large.
- Select good photo or image names when you upload them. This assists in sorting out photos when you want to make a collection or create connections between images.
- Also select an appropriate name for your collection. Choose one that can generally summarize the contents, and don't be too hesitant about the name because you may edit it later on. You can add photos to more than one collection, too.
- Feel free to look at the free photo collections and archives on Footnote, to gather more info and ideas on how to manage and organize your photo collections. You can get hints on how to name your photos more effectively as well. At the same time, don't hesitate to make comments on images posted by other members, as this can also be beneficial to you in making a larger social network.
Another good tip would be to constantly update your profile and your gallery. You have the freedom of adding newer photos and creating newer collections in your gallery, plus you may also edit or delete photos depending on what you want to keep or not.
File names and collection names can also be changed. Part of managing your
gallery involves updating and creating something new every now and then.
Remember that this also keeps your friends in your Footnote network up to date
with your story pages, historical entries, and the like.