The gallery functionality gives you the ability to group a selection of media files and present them as a group with a write up. If you are a radio journalist you may want to gather all the sound clips relating to a particular story into a gallery displayed with the write up of the story. If you are a photographer you may be wanting to create a photo feature, or present a selection of your best shots in a particular genre of photography, or group pictures from a particular event. If you are an organisation you may be wanting to organise material around an event or a theme. Whatever your purpose, the gallery functionality is a simple way to group media files together and display them as a unit.
Instructions for creating and editing a gallery are given below both in video form and in written form with illustrations. To view the videos larger, at the bottom of each video frame either click on the “enter full screen” icon or click on the “watch on Vimeo.com” icon.
Creating a Gallery
1. Login on your site as an administrator or a supplier. As an administrator these 3 links appear – General, Content Management and Website Dashboard. An administrator has access to all the media files on the site, a supplier only has access to their own files.
2. Click on Content Management. That takes you to a page with a sidebar down the left hand side with the tabs Find, Metadata, Admin and Galleries.
3. By default the Find tab will be activated. Take the hint and search for the files you want to gather into a gallery by using the normal search box in the top include. In this case I am compiling a photo gallery and I have searched for “basket” in the search box. The search returned me 53 results.
4. Next step is to select the images I want to include in the gallery. In this case I have selected two. I click on them in the order I want them to appear.
5. Right, I have done the searching and selecting part, now I actually want to get on and create a gallery, so I go and click on the Galleries tab. The sidebar redraws and the gallery tab displays a drop down which is by default on “Create new gallery“.
6. Give your gallery a Title. This is important, because if you don’t you will not be able to find it again when you return to this page at a later stage. Give it a write-up too. This may be a whole article or just a few lines, depending on what type of gallery you are creating. Note that if you click on the word “description” a bigger pop-up appears to help you edit a longer write-up.
7. Then click on “SUBMIT” and that will bring up a pop up with your selection of media files in it.
8. From the selected files, choose one to act as the representative file of the gallery. If yours is a sound file, it won’t matter which one you choose as the icons are all the same. A picture file will obviously differ.
9. Then click on “SUBMIT”. If you followed the steps correctly, a message will tell you that you succeeded in creating a gallery.
10. You won’t actually be able to see the gallery on your drop down list until you have refreshed the page. So the best place to see it is to click on the “Browse” link in the top include. If you are on your own MEMAT web site, you will find it immediately. On the Africa Media Online site you will find it under the Events tab. Click on the representative image of your gallery and you will be taken to a page that displays your gallery.
11. For photographic galleries there is an added bonus of a dynamic display and a slide show if you click on the “View in CoolIris” link. Here you can view the gallery on the 3D Wall or as a slide show
12. If you want to go and edit the gallery then click on the Content Management link at the top of the page again and then click on the Galleries tab. Click on the drop down that says “Create a New Gallery” and scroll down to the gallery you want to edit.
13. That will then load the title and the write up of the gallery in question. It will not load the media files, however. From here you can edit the title and description. Below the write up are four links: Add selected media, View Gallery, Remove Gallery and Re-order Gallery Images.
14. To add more files to the gallery, first search for them and tick them as before. Then find the gallery in the drop-down list on your gallery tab and then click on “Add selected media”. The pop up will load with both the files you had loaded in the past, and the new files you have just loaded. You then confirm that you want to add them.
15. Clicking on “View Gallery” will bring up the pop up with all the media files – from here you can remove files from the gallery.
16. Clicking on “Remove Gallery” will delete the gallery. If you want to just edit the gallery rather don’t delete it, but click on one of the other options.
17. The order of images in a gallery is determined by the order in which you tick them when you add them to the gallery. To re-order the images click on “Re-order Gallery Images” and drag and drop them into the right places and update.