Gallery Help
The Gallery is used to store First Day Cover images. My covers. Your covers.
There are two basic elements to the Gallery - albums and pictures. An album acts like a folder in Windows. It contains pictures and other albums. There are two albums currently available as you enter the Gallery. The important one is called Member Albums. If you open this (click on the cover image), you will find one album for each member. Once you have registered a name, your album will appear. Your job is to fill it with pictures.
The site is set up to allow any member to look at any other members Album, so feel free to browse through other albums. Create sub-albums as needed and use the features to move picutres and albums around as your collection grows. There are many other features of the Gallery software that allow you to change how pictures are presented. The Add Items feature allows you to upload images singly, in groups or in large quantities.
There is a special member album called Shared Albums. This album contains images that do not belong to any member in particular. So far I have used it to capture some useful images like stamps and cachet maker logos, and to store some cover images I captured from the Internet. Because these images were not captured by members, the legality of using the images in a catalogue is in question, but serves to record the existence of such covers.
When you edit a picture, there are several places to record information about it. General information is the first type of information requested, but custom fields can be created. These are important for two reasons. This is the text that is presented with the picture but it is also used to search for pictures.
The other album at the top level is called FDC Cachet Catalogues. This is an experiment in catalogue production. Given that a catalogue will likely include covers from several member albums, this public display area presents images along a single theme. The images in this album (and sub-albums) are taken from member albums. Using the Create a Replica feature allows you to put a copy of an image from a member album into a catalogue album. If the user moves the image in their album, the catalogue 'follows' the image. This is one way to create a shared, public catalogue. But I don't know how well it will meet our needs.
Unfortunately, everything is still a bit unsettled. It's a big package with a lot of flexibility and I haven't had a chance to try everything. There are not standards for naming or the kind of information to record. So please be prepared for some hitches and help me make things smoother by telling me when something isn't right by emailing admin@CanadaFDC.org. Look at what others are doing and experiment. And enjoy.
There is now a section describing Image Uploading in web form or as a PDF file.