Adding Images
Putting pictures into the page helps to break things up, and if a picture paints 1000 words, then it will save on some typing too. To add a picture click on the picture button This will open a new window that lets you browse through thumbnails of the images that have already been uploaded, and to upload new images of your own. The images are organized into namespaces, and the default position for the browser is to open into the same namespace as the page you are editing. Clicking onto a different namespace will let you brows the pictures in that folder. If you click on an image it will open a dialog, that lets you select the size and position of the picture. The text in the page at the point where you had the curser, and if you use the preview function you can see what it will look like. To help describe the picture, you can add a description of the picture after the | The description will appear if you hover the mouse over the image.
{{imagename.jpg|My Description of the Picture}}
External Pictures
You can also link to pictures hosted somewhere else on the web
{{www.myserver.co.uk/mypicture.jpg}}
New Pictures
To add a new picture click on the ‘’Choose File’’ button, and browse on your computer to where the picture is located, select the file, change the filename in the ‘’upload as’’ box, and then click ‘’upload’’. Your image will be uploaded, and the browser will jump to show it, click on the image and it will be inserted. There is also an option to upload more than one file at a time, but if you do that then please rename them before uploading.
Image Naming
With well over 1000 images on the website it is important that we keep them organised, this is done with the filename for the image. The preferred format is:
sailno-yyyymmddx.jpg 2683-20110826a.jpg 2683-20110826b.jpg 2683-20110826c.jpg 2459-1981xxxxa.jpg
Where the ‘’sailno’’ is from the most prominent boat in the picture, ‘’yyyy’’ is the year taken ‘’mm’’ is the month ‘’dd’’ the day ‘’x’’ is incremented if there is more than one taken on the same day. If you are uploading an older picture or can’t remember the date then put in the best estimate you have with ‘’x’’ replacing what you don’t know.
For pictures of boats, the best place to put them is into the ‘’boats’’ namespace, and if correctly named they will then appear automatically in the gallery in the boat page. Have a look at Primal Scream to see how this can work.
If the picture is not of a boat then the bit before the date could be replaced by a sensible description e.g. * fleet-20110515a.jpg
- people-20110515a.jpg
- netly-20110515a.jpg
- rudder-20110515a.jpg
There is an automated gallery function within the website that lets you pick all the pictures with a particular filename, so you can pick all the pictures for your boat, or all the pictures from a specific year. By keeping the filenames consistent it really helps this to work. For more details have a look at the extras page
Image Size
There is no point in uploading an 8MB picture of sea with a tiny boat in the middle, think about cropping down to the interesting part, and resizing to a useful size. The pictures are typically only going to be viewed on screen so having them any bigger than screen size is of no benefit, and just makes it slower to load. I would suggest 1024×768 as the normal maximum, if your photo is amazing and full of interesting detail then go bigger, but think about whether you need to.
Extra Info, or metadata
Once you have uploaded your picture you can add some more information about the picture, this will be displayed when someone clicks on the picture. To edit the metadata click on the small pencil next to the description
This opens a new window where you can add a title, caption, photographer, Copyright info, and keywords By including some metadata with the image it helps image searches like Google Image correctly name and understand the images, which can help to improve the Class search ranking, remind you of when and where the picture was taken and record the photographers copyright over the image.
Gallery
One of the extra features we have on this site is a customised gallery plugin that allows you to automatically select images with simalair file names and display them all on the page, it will automatically update if new images that match the criteria are added.