Ok, i must have done something wrong in setting up the navigation link. I have my pictures in the gallery but there is no link for the members to click on. I tried checking the navigation button and it created a new gallery. How do i get a link to the photos i have already put in my gallery? Thanks.

Go to Gallery Creator and click on the ACTIVE check-box for "Class of 80". It is the "Class of 80" menu item that has the "Enjoy the memories" gallery inside of it.

Kyle, Could ya, would ya look at mine too, the photo gallery is called 'Past 68-69 Reunions' I checked it active, there are 513 pictures and it is set for only admins to upload. Yet, I do not see it in the left column?

Kyle Disregard I got it all figured out.... Duh!

Terry,

Your left-side link for the gallery is called "Past Reunions" you need to click on that, then you can see the "Past 68-69 Reunions" inside of the link.

So first, click on "Past Reunions" - it is 4th from the top on the left side

When i click on class of 80, it is just a blank page that says there are no photo galleries available. I have over 40 pics and can't figure out how to let anybody see them. lol

Robin Faulkner wrote:

Robin,

Your "Enjoy the memories" gallery is associated with the "Enjoy the memories" left-side link, which is not active.

What you probably want to do is EDIT the "Enjoy the memories" gallery (not the WHITE TEXT on a black background - this is the left-side link, but the black text on a white background - this is the gallery). WHen you are editing the gallery, choose "within Link:" and choose the "Class of 80" link to use to display this gallery.

If you need more help, I can do this for you.

I would love for you to do this for me. : )

Robin,

You'll never learn how to do this stuff if you ask Kyle and Brad to do it for you. It's really not as difficult as you might think. I've been down this road numerous times and every site is just a little different--but the satisfaction of doing it yourself is breathtaking.

Just another user who wishes to impart a little wisdom and encouragement!

Robin Faulkner wrote:

Robin, it is done. You can now click on "Class of 80" and see the photos in the "Enjoy the memories" gallery.

Thank you so much.

I get that but i kept trying and it wasn't working. If it is any consolation, i was able to finally get my music up myself with a heads up from Kyle. That was exciting. lol

Kyle,
I'm struggling with my Photo Gallery. At one time, it showed the name of the classmate who posted in a gallery, now it doesn't. Can you check my Photo Gallery out and let me know if it is arranged properly. If not, what should I be doing? Can you give me a site that I can go to that is working exactly as planned?
Judy

All right, let me make something clear about Community Galleries (which you have all 3 of yours set to). The system will only stop at the "cover image" page if TWO OR MORE CLASSMATES have contributed to the gallery. If only 1 person has contributed so far, then taking the viewer to the 1 lone conver image you can possibly click on would just be a waste of a click. So if there is only 1 gallery anyway, we just jump the user directly to the gallery thumbnail images. If there are 2 or more Galleries, then the viewer would be taken to the cover image page where the contributors' names would be listed along with the cover (Polaroid) images.

I can see how this may be a little confusing the first time you create a Community Gallery, especially when you only have 1 Gallery in a Community Gallery. The bottom line though is no matter what kind of gallery you create, if you only have 1 gallery under a navigation link, you will never see the conver image page. For a page of cover images to display you MUST HAVE 2 OR MORE GALLERIES under a navigation link. So in your case, if you want to see cover images like you're anticipating, just add 1 more gallery to any of the Community Galleries you've created so far. Once you've made a community gallery or two all of this will make total sense. Some things just take a lil' playin' around with until you get the jist of it.

Hope that makes sene, and hope that clears up the issue.

I really hate to ask this, because I am obviously way behind the curve on Photo Gallary knowledge, but here goes. Is there a simple explanation for how creating a Photo Gallery will be different than my just using one of the custimizable pages and adding photos? I guess I am just not sure how it is supposed to be different. Of course, on the customizable page, I have to enter photos into a table format, which is really irritating, but maybe the new Photo Gallery is different.

It's extremely different. With a gallery you can quickly batch upload all of your photos. With a manual table you'd have to upload and add them all 1 at a time. There would also be no hierchary or anything else. Really, the best thing to do is spend some time playing with the new Gallery Creator feature. You can deactivate your Gallery and mess around with it all you'd like, all without your Classmates being able to see a thing you're doing. I think if you spend even 10 minutes just doing that alone, you'll see the profound differences between creating a gallery using the new feature, and creating a manual gallery on one of your custom link pages.

Ok, OK, I'll work on it. Just glad I don't have to let the class watch it happen. I know it's going to get messy..............

No it's not.

OK, I have to find the emoticon for total embarrassment. I can't figure out how to get the first photo copied to the Photo Galary. I need the primer on this thing.

Did you create your first navigational link yet? If you did then just add a Gallery. Follow the steps on screen, I absolutely promise you will not find this difficut or need to feel embarrassed. If you've created your navigational link it should be clear what you need to do next in there. Questions, let me know.

I have gone back to try again and have found what I did the first time and am seeing a whole new page.
I went to Gallery Creator, then to Create A Navigational Link, was prompted to Name it and did that (I misspelled Gallery), but when I went back to enter the photos, I did not get the page with the Source tool bar. This morning, I decided to try again and went back to Gallery Creator, then to Create A Navigational Link, and did (this time I spelled Gallery correctly). Now, when I go to the page, both Photo Gallary and Photo Gallery are there as is the Source tool bar. So, I think I am ready to start trying to see what I can do with the page. Only one question, can I delete the first link, so I don't have to go through life with people knowing I cannot spell Gallery correctly? Thanks for your help, I will get this.....

Sure. To the right of the link press Delete.

I had a classmate email me 3 pictures to add to our reunion site, at yearbook photos. I can't get them in there. I did read somewhere that if the little icon is red not yellow it won't work. I am not a computer person at all, so I don't get it. I am good at copy and paste but can't do it with these pictures. Help! Is there an instruction manual on the whole gallery thing? It was easier for me when I could just copy and paste.

In what format are the Yearbook Photos you are trying to add to your site. Yes there is a guide for this, click here to view it.

Adding Yearbook Photos to the site has nothing to do with the Gallery Creator feature. Gallery Creator's sole purpose is to produce photo galleries.

Brad Switzer wrote:

I've entered all the pictures in the photo gallery, "Old Pictures...", designated one as the cover photo but didn't see it as such. Looking through the forums I found this thread and as a result added a second gallery but still see no cover photo. Is it because the second gallery has no pictures in it?

Gallery #2 definitely can't have a cover photo, since the entire gallery has no photos at all currently. Maybe that's somehow causing Gallery #1 to also not show a cover photo, although that shouldn't be the case. Please leave it just like it is currently until a programmer can look at this and see why the cover photo for your first gallery is not displaying.

I had not been on the site between the time I posted the entry to which you replied above and right now about 9:15pm PST. Just now, about 9:20pm PST I went to the site, didn't log on, clicked on Community Photos and Gallery 1 had a cover photo. Could it be there is a time lag before cover photos are shown?

No, we ran a little "fix it" script to auto fix any situations like this. The gallery setup is rather complex, and ultimately cover photo images load directly from the Amazon.com cloud. Your site and 2 others had this issue, where for whatever reason the cover image never made it to the cloud. I'm not really sure why that happened, but when we have a moment we'll write a script that will auto fix this same situation on the fly should it occur again for any reason. Anyway bottom line, consider it fixed.

I will consider it fixed and thanks.

I now have a cover photo but it wasn't the one I designated. I selected the second photo as the cover photo but it is the first photo that is being used. Does the cover photo have to be in the first position?

As a point of reference I've made no changes since my initial entry in this thread a couple days ago.

The first photo is currently set to be your cover photo. I changed it to the second, then changed it back to the first without any problem. Can you try setting it again?

Irrespective of which photo I select to be the cover photo it is always the first photo.

I don't know if this is has anything to do with it or not but when I press Add/Edit Photos and then select another photo to be the cover photo I'm immediately returned to the photo gallery before having a chance to press save changes. However, when I press Add/Edit Photos again the change I had previously made is in effect. But the cover photo is still the first photo.

I usually use Safari. I've emptied the cache to no avail. I get exactly the same results using IE and Firefox.

The cover image can't be set to one thing but display another thing. I know you just said you cleared your cache but are you absolutely sure it cleared? I just went into your gallery and the cover image is still set on the first photo. So I changed it to the second. Which displays fine.

When I viewed the gallery this morning the second photo was displaying as the cover. However, I'm still unable to change it. I'm certain I cleared the cache. Earlier in this thread you said that for whatever reason my site and a couple others were not sending the cover photo selection to the cloud. I don't know if the auto fix you mentioned executes immediately. Could it be that is still the problem and I have to wait for the auto fix to run before the selected photo displays?

No, the cloud would have nothing to do with it. When you say you can't change the cover image, what do you mean specifically? I'm assuming you select the radio button for the cover image you want, and you're then taken back to the master gallery table. Then if you go back into the gallery are you saying the cover image you just selected is no longer selected? Or are you saying it's still selected as you intended, but the system is not actually displaying the correct cover image when you view the gallery live? I'm asking you this because I'm trying to determine if there's a problem in the system, or there's a problem with your own cache even though you're clearing it.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Yes, this is what I'm trying to say.

Wondering if the Upload Permissions selection was having any effect I changed the option from All Classmates to Only Admins. Interesting result. Now even logged in as an admin I no longer have the option to add photos when I view the gallery.

Completely normal. That upload button only appears on the public gallery if the gallery is a community gallery (since Classmates have no access to your Admin). Admins don't need a button on the public gallery, they just click Gallery Creator to do all of their photo gallery management.

Of course. Sorry to take your time on what should have been obvious to me.

F C Bock wrote:

Technically it's not possible. Although I have zero doubt you're accurately describing what you are seeing. For some odd reason your browser MUST be loading a previous version of the page. What do you have your caching options set to? In Internet Explorer try setting it to "Every time I visit the web page."

I have to log off completely and then power down the PC and then re-boot and then log back on to see some changes... This clears the IE memory as well...

Brad Switzer wrote:

I have set IE to "Every time I visit the web page." I've visited the site, closed IE, revisited the site via IE and I continue to see the same thing. Also the same in either Firefox or Safari.

Stumped. You're seeing a different cover photo in the live gallery than the cover photo you have selected in admin, right? Do you happen to have a different computer? If so what do you see on it? You've hit me with a good curve ball on this one.

Just to make sure we're on the same page here:

* You currently have no photos in one of your galleries, so you're not talking about that gallery at all.

* In your other gallery you have 13 photos, and you currently have photo #2 set to be your cover photo. That photo has a caption of "High School photo from a post card I saw on e-bay. Uploaded by fcb."

* In your live gallery you're seeing some other photo displaying for the cover image. I.E. you're not seeing photo #2. Right? What specific photo are you seeing for the cover image? What # of the 13 is it?

I've looked at this on numerous computers in every possible web browser and it's working perfectly. Sorry for being redundnat, but are you absolutely positive you're NOT seeing photo #2 for the cover image? It looks a little different when it's enlarged a bit on the cover image than it looks in your smaller thumbnail preview in Admin. It really is the exact same photo though. At least that's what I'm seeing, anyway.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Also in response to your question as to whether or not I had access to another computer. The answer is yes, my wife's laptop, which is running IE 8. I set the option to every time I visit the web page and see the same thing that I see on my computer.

Would it be of any use if you were to sign on my site with my e-mail and password? I'm certainly willing to pass that along to you if it will.

I got a question - should changing the cover photo radio button AND NOT CLICKING "Save Changes" change the cover photo? It does and I think it shouldn't.

Kyle Erickson wrote:

I don't even get a chance to click save changes if I change a cover photo radio button.

By the way, if you could reduce the size of the font of my replies to Brad I'd appreciate it. For some reason I'm not able to edit them.

FC,

You currently have your aerial photo set to be your cover image. Caption "Aerial view of Springfield thought to have been taken between 1945 and 1955. Uploaded by fcb." And that's exactly what is displaying as the cover image. If that's not what you're seeing I may have to turn you over directly to the programmer for resolution, as I'm completely stumped. Every browser on the planet shows it's working correctly, it's clearly correct in the database, and the cover photo is displaying exactly in accordance with your current selection. I have no clue what's going on, other than I'm absolutely convinced it's a local computer or provder issue. Does your Internet provider possibly cache pages for awhile before updating them? That's the last thing I can possibly think of that would explain why you're not immediately seeing your changes. You're the only one reporting this, it MUST be something along those lines.

Kyle Erickson wrote:

It needs to for 2 reasons:

1) Some of these photo pages are extremely long. It would be easily to select a different cover image and forget to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to save it. Immediately saving the changes makes it impossible to fail it.

2) It's imperative the change be saved immediately if the gallery is a commmunity gallery. Reason being that if you have "All" selected from the dropdown list at the top, you're setting the cover image for the main gallery. But if you have one of the contributors' names selected from the dropdown at the top, then you're changing the cover image for that specific contributor's gallery. This is NOT intuitive and there's no way it can be. For this reason when you make a change to a community gallery cover image, we immediately display a popbox box in the center of the screen describing what cover image has been set, and also describing how to set the individual contributors' cover images. Those boxes pop up, the instructions can't be missed, the change is immediately saved, and the Admin now has a chance to change the dropdown and set additional cover images within a community gallery.

Don't worry if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you're using the community gallery mode, it will make perfect sense to you as you're in there setting the cover photos. It's far more intuitive within the process of actually doing it than I'm able to describe it here.

There is still a mismatch. I kept selecting a different cover photo when I was using my wife's computer. The one that currently shows up is one that I chose during that period. The one I currently have designated is not that one though.

Before turning me over to a programmer let me have one of my co-admins give it a try and see what their experience is. My ISP is Time Warner/Roadrunner. I'll see if I can find out if they cache pages. I'll also go to a public library and use a machine there.

Yes, do me a favor and change nothing, then check back later and see if your last changes are now reflected. This almost HAS to be what it is. I.E. your provider themselves is caching recently viewed pages, not expecting them to be changing by the second like we're doing with this scenario here. If your recent changes are later seen without you or I doing anything differently, I'll be 99% sure that your Internet provider caching pages is the cause of this. If we determine that's the case, the good news is:

1) You can be sure others are seeing your changes immediately
2) You can be sure that given time you will also see your changes

AHA! This is DEFINITELY it. I just read an article about how Time Warner / Roadrunner caches images as they are uploaded.

They cache images in order to serve them up super fast to their customers and also to reduce their own bandwidth. The only problem with that, is in cases like this, they happen to be serving up super fast images that aren't current. And from what I can tell from your responses, it seems it can take awhile before they refresh their cache too. If you're working with a web page in real time I can see how that would be incredibly annoying.

Anyway, I think we've nailed this. The bottom line is when you make changes to your gallery pages (or potentially other areas of your site too that deal with images), you may not see those changes reflected immediately due to Roadrunner caching. You will, however, see those changes whenever they update their cache.

I'll certainly do as you request and give you an update in a couple days. A question I have, and it's rhetorical at this point, is why do I see all other changes I make on the site immediately but not this one?

It seems to be related to specifically image caching. There also may be a certain threshold (K size of total images) that causes their system to cache. I'm just guessing. Something about the Photo Gallery Maker feature must be kicking their system into cache mode. If you wait it out I suspect you're going to see all changes kick in a little after the fact.

I'm tempted to shout Eureka! Here's what I've found regarding selection and display of a cover photo.

If the Upload Permissions setting is All Classmates there are two "locations" where the root administrator (and it appears only the root administrator) can ostensibly select the photo that is to appear on the gallery cover.

One is by entering the Galleries as any classmate would which in my case is by selecting the Community Photos tab. Clicking on a Gallery, Old Pictures of Springfield in my particular case, takes one to a page that has at the bottom an Add/Edit Photos button. Note a co-administrator did not see this button but rather a button to Add Your Own Photos to This Gallery. Clicking on the Add/Edit Photos button gives a page showing all the photos with each one having a radio button labeled Cover Photo. Throughout our conversation it is at this "location" that I'd been selecting cover photos with no success. That lack of success has been consistent and continues.

The second location, which I tried this morning for the first time, is accessed by clicking on Gallery Creator. Clicking on PHOTOS next to a gallery gives a screen essentially identical to the one described above showing all the photos with each one having a radio button labeled Cover Photo. When I select a cover photo here and then click on the Community Photos tab the newly selected cover photo is correctly displayed!

A suggestion would be to eliminate the root administrator Add/Edit Photos option, change it to Add Your Own Photos to This Gallery which then requires the cover photo to be selected at the Gallery Creator location.

Oh my gosh (that wasn't my first choice of words but this is a public forum)! You've got to be kidding me. I never realized you were setting cover photos from the public button, nor did I realize that the settings when accessed from that area don't actually work. Now it all makes perfect sense! You know it's always the little things... I'm glad YOU figured this out, I was still standing out in the dark in left field on this one. Thank you!

Don't know if the slideshow feature is new but I just saw it for the first time. How cool is that? Good show!

We just added that this afternoon. It's kinda like putting the icing on the cake.

I really love the slideshow feature. Can we add music to it? Since I have 3 galleries within my Navigational Link, does that make a difference as to whether it can be done or not? Thank you, Frances

You have a text block above every gallery. What I've seen people doing so far is just embedding Playlist.com (or similar music players) right there. This way when people enter the gallery the thumbnail images dislay, the music begins playing, and the music continues playing the entire time the slideshow is showing. This works very well.

Note, doing this will currently ONLY work if the gallery is set to an "Admin Only" gallery. If you have set your gallery to be a community gallery, the gallery will be divided up into many different members' photo contributions, and as people navigate around the music would stop playing. You can still embed an instance of a music player above the cover photo images in a community gallery though. The viewer would have to click on the "pop out player" button to hear the music continually though as they navigate around the community gallery.

Bottom line: If you want to embed music that continues playing while the slideshow is running, it's best to set your gallery to "Admin Only". Creating an Admin Only gallery in combination with using Playlist.com is a great way of creating a music slideshow.

If you want to give this a whirl and need any assistance, just let me know.

I've created another gallery called "Networking" for classmates to load their business cards
There is no "add photo" button at the bottom.
Did I forget to do something when I set it up?
Would this be the best way to show business cards from alumni?
Guess it's a moot point if no one can add a photo!

Judy,

Go to Gallery Creator, Edit "Networking" gallery (not navigational link)
Change the "Upload Permissions:" to one of the following:

Only Admins: Allows only Site Administrators to upload photos to the gallery.

All Classmates: Allows both Site Administrators and Classmates to participate in uploading photos to the gallery. Each Classmate can create his or her own unique gallery within the master gallery. All photos uploaded by Classmates will be credited to them!

All Classmates, But Approve Photos First: Allows both Site Administrators and Classmates to upload photos, but before photos added by Classmates go live on the site they must be approved by an Administrator first.

Then save the changes. You will also need to activate the Navigational Link so that your "Networking" link shows up to your classmates.

Thank you, Kyle!

Was also wondering why that gallery looks so different from our other gallery. "Our Photo Gallery" page looks like a polaroid with a paper clip. The new one I created "Networking" has a heavy black border around the photo, and there is a bold green box around it.

As classmates add photos, you will get more paper clips. The paper clips represent the photos uploaded by different classmates. Since "Networking" only has one business card, no need to have an extra step and show it with a paper clip.

If you click on the "Our Photo Gallery", then click on one of the paper clips, you will see the photos (with a bold green box around it). The "Networking" is already at that page with the green box around it because there is only one photo in the gallery.

I guess this is as good a thread as any to ask this...

We exceeded our File Vault limit and I was trying to reduce the size of some photos to reduce our usage. It seems that the size of our use went up when I did that. I assume it's because Class Creator is backing up the photos I'm resizing.

How do I get our usage size down without deleting photos and re-iploading resized ones? Or will this even do the trick?

The image editor is not supposed to save resized images as new files, but just overwrite the existing file. However, if the original image was not larger than the maximum dimensions defined in the image uploader, and if that image was saved with a lower quality setting, the resized image which is smaller in dimension could actually be larger in file size.

The only way to assure reduction of of file vault usage is to remove files, such as music files and uploaded documents (assuming you don't want to remove images).

OK, so I deleted 28.8 MB of photos and now the file vault size is 227 MB vs the 204 MB before the deletion. What gives?

Mike,

According to your other post, you aren't having a problem anymore, right?

Kyle,

That's correct.

Mike

Has the Feb. 2010 suggestion of the Springfield (VT) HS Class of '58 Admin. re: confusion of a 'public' v. administrative "button"/method for selecting a gallery cover photo been taken up by CC, thus remedying this confusion?

Cheryl Y. Stryker wrote:

There is no longer any confusion. The functionality is now the same in both areas and has been for some time. CC made the correction within days.