Rules: Subject matter for the photo gallery will be fishing related only. Pornography, bikini girls from Sports Illustrated, pictures of that party you went to last night, and any similar content will not be tolerated. Posting inappropriate content will result in your gallery being removed and your forum access blocked.

How do I get a Gallery?: Go to any page on the Gallery and click on register in the upper left hand corner (show me). Fill out the form and click register (show me the form). You will recieve an email immediately. This email will contain a link that you need to click on to activate your account. Click on that link and your account will be activated. Your email will never be posted online or shared, sold or otherwise compromised. 

Logging In: To add or modify photos in your gallery, you need to login. Click the login link in the upper right hand corner of the page or use the login box in the navigation on the left side of the page. (show me). Once you login, you will stay logged in to the gallery until you log out.

I forgot my password, what should I do?: Go to the gallery. You will see a box in the upper left where you can enter your user name and password. Try logging in. If your password is incorrect it will take you to a second page where you can click, " Lost or forgotten passwords can be retrieved using the recover password page ". Your password will be emailed to you.

Uploading Pictures: Once you are logged in, there are several methods for adding photos or video. Again look in the upper right where it says ‘album options'. Click that pulldown menu and click on ‘Add Items' (show me). Clicking on ‘Add Items ' will bring up a new page with 5 tabs. The ones you are most likely to use are 'From a Web Browser', 'From Web Page', or 'Upload Applet'. The Windows XP option is very convenient but requires some advanced configuration if you want to use it. There is no limit to how many images you can have in your gallery.

From a Web Browser: This is the simplest, most straightforward way to add  items to your gallery. Click on the browse button. This will bring up a window that will show the contents of your local computer. Navigate your way to the folder where your items are. Click the items you want, and click Open (show me). The window will close and you'll be taken back to the 'From Web Browser' upload form. Type in your caption (show me). You can add as many items as you like using this form, but you'll need to click the link for 'more' to get more upload boxes (show me).

When you have filled out the form as described above, go to the bottom of the page and click 'Add Items' (show me). You should leave the other options alone such as 'Create thumbnails now' and the watermark selection option.

Upload Applet: The upload applet is cool because it allows you to add a bunch of items at the same time. The upload applet requires Java 1.4.x or higher installed on your computer. If you want to check and see what version of java you have, you can click on Start -> Run and type the word ‘command' in the run box. This will bring up a dos prompt where you can type ‘java –version' to get your version (show me). If you don't have 1.4.something or higher, you can download the latest from here.

To bring up the Upload Applet, click on the tab (show me). It will take a moment to load up, and you'll get a Java logo while it loads. Once the window is up, click on 'Add Pictures'. This will pop up a window that will show the conents of your local computer. Navigate your way ot the folder where your items are. Click on the item you want and cilck Add (show me). You may also select more than one item at a time by holding down the shift key, clicking on the first item, then clicking on the last item and letting go of the shift key. Selecting individual items can be accomplished similarly by holding down the Control key on the keyboard. You can add items from multiple directories to the list by adding them, then clicking Add Pictures again. When you have the list populated with the items you want to upload, click on the Upload button.

From Web Page: This option allows you to add an item that is already published online somewhere. For example, you might have a photo that you added to a post on the forum and now you want to add it to your gallery. To do this, first go to the web page where your photo is displayed online. Right click on the image and click on the properties (show me). This screen may look slightly different depending on what web browser you are using, but the concept is always the same. When you right click and click properties you'll get a small pop up window. In that window you will see a direct link to your image. Highlight that link with your mouse, right click on the text and click Copy (show me). Note that if you are using the Firefox browser, you can also just right click the image and click on 'Copy Image Location' as a shortcut method.

Also note that if you have a directory with multiple images, you can paste the directory URL instead of the image path and Gallery will look for all the images in that directory (advanced users).

Now go to the 'From Web Page' upload form in the gallery, right click in the box that says URL and click paste (show me). Next click on find files. The gallery will look up that URL and validate that it is correct. It takes about 1 second. Now check the box next to the image(s) you want to upload and then click the 'Add URL's' button (show me).

Setting the Caption:  The main caption in bold text is the Title.  I recommend setting the title for all your pics because that is what will show up on the home page when your picture is displayed.  To edit captions for a group of pictures at the same time, go to the gallery you are interested in and click on Edit Captions.  You can edit 9 images at a time on this screen, very convenient!

Modifying Images: There are a number of options available to modify the images in your gallery. All of these options are available in the 'Edit Photo' menu on the left side of the page (show me). Clicking on that link brings up all of the possible editing options for the image. The options you are most likely to use are in the 'General' tab and the 'Crop Thumbnail' tab. Hopefully these options are self explanatory.

Rearranging Your Gallery: There are two general ways to rearrange your gallery. The first method is to change the default sort order, so that as you add items to the gallery they sort automatically based on file name. To do this, go to your album, click on 'Edit Album', click on the 'Album' tab and use the pull down for Sort Order to set the sort order to whatever you like (show me).

A common sort order you might use would be to sort by Title descending. This way if you name your fish by weight, you can sort them by weight descending automatically. Another example would be by Title ascending, that's what I use to sort the member galleries automatically.  Be warned though, changing this option will re-sort your gallery as soon as you click save!

The second option for re-sorting your gallery is to go to your gallery, click on 'Rearrange Items' and use the visual interface to sort your items. The basic concept is that you click once on the image you want to move to select it (it will get a red highlight around it) then you click on top of the imagewhere you want to move it to. Remember to click save when you are done. This is hard to show with screen shots so I haven't documented it, but it works great.

Move Photo: To move a photo from one gallery to another, go to the photo and click on 'Move Photo'. You may also move a range of photos between galleries by selecting the first and last photo you want to move (show me).

Delete Photo: Delete one or more photos permanently from your gallery. Cannot be undone!

Creating Nested Albums: If you want to create additional albums within your main album, click the 'Add Album' button from your main album page. There is no limit on how many albums you can add.

Commenting on Someone Else's Photo: If you are a registered user and you're logged in to the gallery, you can go to any item and click on 'Add Comment'.  As a gallery owner, you can remove any comment you find inappropriate on your gallery.  This is just for fun, so please don't abuse it.

Watermarks: When a photo is displayed on calfishing.com, the gallery software recognizes that you are viewing the photo locally and does not display the www.calfishing.com watermark on the picture. However, if the image is displayed via another server, like if you post it on another site, then the watermark shows up. I don't mean this to be an inconvenience, but I figure it's a fair trade for getting to host your pics here on the site for free

Note that it is also possible when you add or edit a photo, to manually specify that you want the watermark to be used on the pic. I don't see any real reson to do it, but if you feel so inclined you can go to the image, click edit photo, then go to the watermark tab and check the boxes to watermark the thumbnail, cropped image, or original image. You can uncheck those boxes to turn it off.

Note from 12/6/06 - Watermarking is currently disabled. 

What is this option "Print on Shutterfly.com"?:  I've enabled the Shutterfly option as a convenience for anyone who wants to print out pictures from their gallery. Basically you select the photos you want to print and you pay Shutterfly.com to print them out and mail them to you. This is not an endorsement of the service (I've never used it) but merely a convenience for you.

How do I pick which picture shows up as the main picture in my gallery?: Log in and go to the picture that you want to highlight. Click the drop down menu under the picture. Click on "Make Highlight"

I am tired of having to make a lot of clicks to get to the gallery I want to get to, how do I speed it up?: In the navigation on the left and at the bottom of every page is a pull down menu that can link you to any gallery in the site so you don't have to click your way to it.

General Advice: If possible, please upload your pictures at a width of 500 pixels. This size will save me on server space. A few large images is fine, but everyone uploads all their raw image from their scans or digital cameras at 1200x1600 etc, it will suck up a lot of space. If you need help resizing images, try reading the photo upload tutorial for the forum.

Posting a Pic from my Gallery to the Forum: Another thing that will help save space is if you are putting a report up on the forum, upload your images to the gallery first, then follow the instructions above in the 'From Web Page' section to get the URL of the image like:

http://calfishing.com/albums/album02/10_31_2.sized.jpg

And paste that URL into your post on the forum to make the image show up.

More Options:  The Gallery has many many options, too many to cover in this help file.  If you have a specific question about any feature in the gallery, please email me.  If you're curious about an option, try it out and see what happens.  Many of the options are self explanatory and can be fun to play around with.