Forgot your password?
New user?
Document Actions
Create a photo album
This How-to is intended for:
Content Managers
If your group has a collection of photographs that they want to be able to load and show users, the process is fairly simple.
Prepare the photo's or images first
Many digital cameras now can produce normal photo file sizes of 1-4Mb - which is far too big for most websites - particularly for people on dialup.
Before loading any pictures, please use some imaging software to reduce the file size to around 200kb or less. Cameras and scanners normally have software bundled to edit images.
This will still provide a good quality image suitable for websites, but not take excess time to download. The smaller the better. Depending upon your software, you may get options to convert images to around 100 dpi, quality can be medium to low, pixels can be between 600-1000 wide, or size of around 10cm by 15cm or less.
Check you have permissions
Be aware that there are privacy issues with putting pictures of people, particularly children, on websites. You should have people's permission to put their picture on the website, and must have parents or guardian (school) permission to load pictures of children on a website. If you cannot secure permission, only load pictures which cannot identify children - ie too far away or no faces showing.
Add photos to group Photo Album
Every group site now has a photo album already setup to display and add photos. Users can add individual photos, or albums (collections) within this album - there is no limit to the number of albums or images within the group photo album.
To add photos, simply click on the link on the group home page, and then click on the Upload photos button. Users can select single or multiple files to upload. This is the fastest option with the file name becoming the title, but will not include any descriptive text. It is then possible to create new folders and cut and paste images into different folders.
To add albums, navigate to the group Photo Album via navigation box, and select Add New, then either Folder (for a new collection) or Image.
For best results, have a separate folder for different projects or events, and you can have any number of folders within these - eg a separate folder for each event, project or year.
In the group website, add the folder item, name it and save. Use the Add Item drop down list.
Add the pictures to the folder as 'images' in the item drop down list. Give them a good description so people can find out what the picture shows.
Remember to publish them all.
Change the display
When viewing a folder, you can change how a folder displays the contents. The default is standard view, which will not display the images.
Click on the 'display' drop down in the green menu above the page, and select 'thumbnail view from the list. This will then show a thumbnail (miniature picture) of each picture as a photo album style view. When people click on an image, they will be shown the full picture. The description will be displayed when users hold the cursor over the thumbnail image.
The Summary view option will display both the thumbnail and the description from each image. This may be useful for collections where the description is important for users to see.
