48 Internet Services

New Photo Albums for TOPS Interactive Web Sites

This month, we are pleased to announce the addition of a popular request for TOPS Interactive Web Sites - Photo Albums. The new Photo Albums feature provides an interactive method to display collections of photos on your web site.

Administrators can create an unlimited number of Photo Albums, each of which can contain an unlimited number of photos. Each album has a default thumbnail "Cover" image and a short description. Albums will then be displayed in a list with the cover image on the left, and the album description on the right.

When you click on the album cover thumbnail, you will be presented with a new thumbnail view of all of the photos inside that album. From here, you can click on any thumbnail to view the full size image, and then use the back and next buttons to navigate among the photos. Each photo that is uploaded to an album may have an associated caption, which will display under the thumbnail, and on the full size view. Additionally, if you use your mouse cursor to hover over a thumbnail, a tool tip will pop up with the full caption text. Finally, each image includes a counter that displays how many times the image has been viewed on the web site.

Notes for Administrators:

Initially, the new Photo Albums feature has been made available only to Administrators through the Admin Only menu section. Please take the time to set it up the way you want it, and when you are ready to go live with the new feature, fill in the Menu Change form to let us know what to call it, where to place it on the menu, and whether to delete the old Photo Gallery from the menu. If you wish to have a view-only version of the Photo Albums visible on the public side of your site, please let us know that too.

All new sites rolled out from this point forward will automatically have the Photo Albums link on the main menu, instead of the old Photo Gallery link. For existing sites, TOPS will not be converting your existing Photo Gallery into the new Photo Albums feature. If you wish to transfer your existing data over, it will need to be done manually. Please contact Web Support if you have any questions or need assistance.

When you create a new Photo Album, you will be able to define both the view security level and the edit security level. If you want residents to be able to upload images to your web site, be sure to create at least one album with an edit level of 50. If you wish an album to be viewable on the public side of your web site, remember that you must set the View security level to 100. By default, only administrators can create new albums. Please let Web Support know if you would like to allow another security level to create their own photo albums.

There are a few restrictions that you should also be aware of to help you take full advantage of the new Photo Albums feature:

1. All images uploaded to your albums will be automatically resized to a proportional width or height of 400 pixels. This means that the largest side of the image, either width or height, will be resized proportionally to no more than 400 pixels. Images whose height and width are smaller than 400 pixels will not be resized.
2. Thumbnails are automatically created from the image at 100 x 100 pixels. If the image is not square, part of the image will be cropped off in the resultant thumbnail image. This does not affect the actual size image at all.
3. The program will only accept images with a JPG or JPEG file extension. No other file types may be uploaded to the Photo Album feature at this time.
4. Each image file is automatically renamed when it is uploaded to a Photo Album. This avoids any problems due to individuals uploading photos with duplicate names.
5. Images uploaded to Photo Albums are not accessible via the Rich Text Editor. You may still link to images using the http:// address in the upper right hand corner of the Rich Text Editor's insert image dialogue box, but you may not directly browse for an image that is in an album. If you need instructions on how to link to an image's URL as described above, please email websupport@topssoft.com.
6. The total size of all images allowed in a single web site's photo albums is 20 MB. The total size of space being used on your web site is displayed under the Statistics menu under Show Site Statistics.

We have a lot of exciting plans for the Photo Album feature, and I think you will be pleased not only with this initial release version, but also with the many additions we will be bringing out in the coming months!

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