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Why do my images take so long to upload?
There are two possible reasons. 1) You could be on a very slow internet connection, such as a dialup connection. If that's the case, it's very important that you follow the following advice. 2) Your images are probably very large. Images that come off of your digital camera are far larger than what's shown on the web.
Solution: Use an application on your computer to reduce the dimensions of your images first (I reduce all images from 1600 x 1200 pixels to 700 x 525). Uploading will improve drastically in speed. NEW
: I highly recommend the very simple, free and cross-platform application RESIZE. A very simple application that is a perfect compliment to imagecog.
Resize will let you resize a whole folder full of images at once (be sure to keep your originals large, the resized images are just for uploading to the web). back to top ↑
What is the 'quality' setting?
The Quality setting allows you to apply jpg compression. What this means is that with .jpg images (most dig cameras take jpg images) you can 'compress' them (making them load faster) without any noticeable photo distortion. However, applying too much compression can distort the image. A good range for the Quality setting is about 55 to 85 (note: I've noticed that it can be kind of severe. Start by setting quality to 85 -- you probably won't notice a difference in the image but you'll see the file size go down. Then decrease by 5s or 10s from there). IMPORTANT: Once you reduce the quality, you cannot reverse this. If the quality becomes unacceptable to you, you'll need to re-upload the photo from your computer. back to top ↑
What do crop and uncrop do?
Crop and Uncrop change the dimensions of thumbnails. If you have a photo that is longer vertically than horizontally, it will create uneveness in the layout of your gallery. Cropping part of that thumbnail image (cutting part of it off) will make your layout cleaner, but also sacrifice some of your image. back to top ↑
Please explain the hierarchy of categories/galleries/images
A picture is worth a thousand words. back to top ↑
How big should my photos be?
Make your photos dimensionally any size you want. However, keeping the DATA size of your photos small is important. In the 'Edit Images' pane, you'll see the image data size just below the thumbnail. To allow for people who use modems to easily browse your site, I'd recommend keeping the images under 100K. Setting the size to around 30 - 60k will make them happy. There are two ways to do this: 1) Reduce the dimensions -- for example, change the width to 500 pixels. 2) play with the Quality setting. For example, set the quality between 45 and 55. back to top ↑
I didn't set any photo to be the icon for my category or gallery, yet one shows up!
If you do not specifically choose a photo to 'put on the gallery front page', one will be selected randomly. back to top ↑
Is this a business or hobby or what? How many people use this?
Currently this is a hobby and there are only a handfull of people who use imagecog. My day job is as a freelance web developer and I have a bevy of other hobbies, including several novels I wobble about my office like penguins. Thus my plans for imagecog are grand, my time small. It's free and will continue to be free in the future, however I may look at adding a way or two to make some money down the road (for example, allowing people to order prints of photos, etc). If you have any bright suggestions or otherwise, please drop me a line.
If you feel really grateful and you'd like to help pay for the hosting of this site or the development of imagecog, you may make a donation here (this goes straight to my web host bill, not to me). Alternately, if you sign up w/ my hosting company, I will get a bit nicked off my bill. Drop me suggestions for how I could improve this project, or anything else. back to top ↑
What are PRIVACY PREFERENCES and how do I use them?
The [privacy preferences] menu lets you control who can see your photos. I'm a fairly private person, and so you may see that imagecog's privacy preferences are quite a bit more in-depth than many photo sites.
At imagecog, you create access groups and decide which photo categories each group will be able to access.
An Example: Say you have a group of very nerdly friends, lets call them NERDFRIENDS, that you go to a programming conference with. Why bore your literary friends [LITFRIENDS] with pics of nerd things, and why bore your nerd friends with pics of author readings. However, both sets of friends might like to see pics of your world travels.
And so you create two access groups, NERDFRIENDS and LITFRIENDS.
To NERDFRIENDS you assign the image categories "programming conference" and "world travels"
To LITFRIENDS you assign the image categories "author readings" and "world travels".
Each group only sees the sets of photos that you assign them to see.
Start by creating a new access group, in the description let's just call it FAMILY. Now Create a LOGIN and Password for this group.
Next choose to 'Add Categories' to your access group. You'll see your FAMILY access group in the lower part of the SET ACCESS screen. Select an existing category (in this case, let's call the category 'Baby Pictures') and click 'Add'.
After it submits, you'll notice that this Category, Baby Pictures, is now under Private Categories and not under Public Categories. Public categories are categories of photos that Everyone can view if they haven't logged in. To see a private category (or set of categories), you have to have the proper login.
NOW either send all of the people you want to have access to that group the Login and Password, and tell them to login using the login link on the front page of your gallery (at the bottom) OR, even better, copy the 'access link' URL by right-clicking on it. Then just send that link out and people will automatically be logged in without having to do anything.
Try testing the 'access link' yourself to make sure that you can view all public categories and the private categories you've assigned to that group.
This will place a cookie on your machine, so that you'll always see just those categories. If you want to delete the cookie and just see public galleries again, click on 'access link' at the bottom of the Public Categories box.
Please play with the concept of this 'access link' and think about what it entails -- the access link has the login information built directly into the URL. If you send out that access link the people who receive it will be able to view private galleries without logging in and will always be logged in -- great! how easy! -- but if they post that to the internet somewhere then it's really no longer private, now is it then. You can always delete an access group or change the login information if this gets to be the case, but you may want to emphasize when you send out an access link that they're getting a special link. back to top ↑
How do I use Imagecog to put a photo on craigslist (or somewhere else)?
If you want to use a photo that you've uploaded here somewhere else on the web - no problem, it's easy.
Make sure you're logged in to edit photos.
Surf to the photo you want to post elsewhere, at the very bottom there's a link that says "show image url". Click this and copy the contents.
In many cases, you can simply paste this image url into various places. However, you may need to turn it into html with an image tag.
An image tag looks like this:
<img src="http://imagecog.net/the_url_you_copied_above">
Good luck.
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I still can't get the hang of privacy preferences...
Here are what my privacy preference look like:
I have 4 access groups:
Public -- the categories that I don't mind if anyone sees
Family -- categories that relate pretty intimately to my life. Baby pics, vacations, etc
Friends -- friends shares a lot of similarities to family, but I spare them some baby pics, and I may also have some bar crawl categories here that family can't see.
ALL - This contains everything. This is the ultimate level of access. I create this so I can view everything, and see what I have. It's what I use to surf my own site.
Now here are some of my photo categories that I will divvy into these groups.
Nature photos (put in no group, thus it's public to all)
Vacations (put in family & friends)
baby photos (put in family)
Poker game (put in friends)
Macro shots (put in none, thus public)
A wedding (put in family)
Now every time I want to show pictures, I send my friends the access link for their galleries (and they'll see: Nature photos, vacations, poker game, macro shots) and the family access link to my family (they'll see Nature photos, vacations, baby photos, macro shots, wedding).
A random surfer to the site will see only (nature photos, macro shots). back to top ↑
RSS What? (subscribe to a gallery via RSS)
All galleries now have RSS feeds!
See the link at the bottom of your gallery.
RSS allows you to subscribe to websites. That means people who regularly surf your gallery will be notified whenever you post new photos. Keep in mind that if they are logged on to one of your access groups, they will get the RSS feed for that set of categories.
You can also subscribe to your comments, which means you can be notified via rss anytime someone comments on one of your photos.
Do a google search on RSS for more information.
You'll need RSS software to subscribe to an RSS feed. If you're on a mac, I highly recommend NetNewsWire Lite.
If you have a PC recommendation, let me know.
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How do I upload a .ZIP archive of photos?
Sweet, a new upload method, Finally. This is one of the things that drives me the most-crazy about getting photos to the web -- it takes a while. Hopefully being able to upload zip archives will ease this. In the future I'd like for people to simply email their imagecog account -- if you've got some code lying around for this, please flag me down.
Mac users can create zip archives from the finder as of mac os x 10.3. Simply select the images you'd like to upload in the finder, or a folder of images, control-click on these and select "Create Archive of [file name]". You will probably see a progress-bar, and then a new file will appear with a .zip extension. Upload this via the normal method.
This seemed to be an able enough tutorial on how to create and upload files from a windows pc. back to top ↑
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