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[shavethewhales]

One of the best ways to experience the park from home is through the reading of others' photo trip reports, or PTR's for short. SDCFans' photo sharing features allow users to create galleries of shared photos complete with detailed descriptions to recap a past visit, unearth old attractions, display scrap-book clippings, or share any other images related to the park.

Creating a New Photo Album

Step 1. Go to your profile at http://www.sdcfans.com/profile/ and click the icon at the top that says Upload Photos

Step 2. On the screen, you'll be given a short form to fill out the album title and a description for the album as a whole and upload a thumbnail for the album. The final option, dubbed Active allows you to determine whether or not the album will be active on the site. If an album is not active, it won't show up on the site and won't be displayed publicly. You may want to keep your new album inactive and activate it later when all of your photos are in order. (This step will probably change soon).


Step 3. After you've created your gallery, you can upload photos to it. The next screen should appear as it does below, HOWEVER, for users browsing with Internet Explorer, you may or may not see the button that says Select Files. If you don't, click the giant box with the arrow and skip to the alternate step 3.

For everyone else, click the Select Files button and a file dialog will pop up. As soon as you select a photo, the file uploader will automatically upload it and it will appear below with a text input box beside it where you can type in your image description. You can do this over and over again, though I don't recommend uploading more than 20 files at once on this screen - could get a bit laggy when you finally hit submit at the bottom to submit the image descriptions. Don't forget to hit submit when you are done adding photos or your descriptions will be lost.



Alternate Step 3: If the Select Files button isn't working for you, you can click that giant box with the arrow and go to a different screen where there are 5 static file input boxes with text areas beneath for your descriptions. Simply fill out this form and return later to add more photos.


Step 4. Your gallery should now be mostly complete, but you'll probably want to go back and edit it or add more photos. From your profile page (http://www.sdcfans.com/profile/) you'll see a list of your photo albums. Just click on the one you want to edit and you'll see the screen below.

You can add more photos using either of the features at the top, or you can edit already uploaded photos by clicking the Edit Current Photos line. A table should drop down with all of your photos in it, with options besides them to either edit or delete.

The line titled Edit Gallery Details gives you a small form to edit the gallery title or description and change the active status.




Editing a Photo Album
See step 4 above.



What do you guys think? Is it easy enough? Honestly it's a bit more clunky than I wanted it to be, but I ran into so much trouble with the automatic photo uploader not working in IE that I ended up spending most of my time trying to get that to work than making the entire thing as user-friendly as it should be. Hopefully I'll be able to clean it up a bit more with the next revision of the site.

If you use Firefox or Chrome and know what you're doing though, it can be pretty handy.  


If you run into any trouble, post here or shoot me a PM.

[Ozark Outlaw]

Awesome work shave! What a great addition to the site.

I am still trying to work out some bugs on my end though. After I complete Step 2, and I click “Add Album,” I get redirected to this page http://www.sdcfans.com/profile/photos/add2 which has the website’s background only, and nothing else.

I waited a few minutes for words, or pictures to show up, but nothing happens. Perhaps I am not waiting long enough, or doing something wrong. I am still playing around with it.

I am using Internet Explorer if that is a consideration.

[shavethewhales]

Hmmm, I'll have to send you a PM to get more info. I did go in and add another couple of error messages where there were none before as in your case. I also fixed another couple of bugs.

I will definitely be going back through this and cleaning it up with the next site make-over that's coming soon. It's already turning into a headache like the last one, but at least it sort of works 

[Ozark Outlaw]

Oh, you know me. I'm pretty good with user errors!

This is going to be a fantastic feature. I am anxious to see if others have success with it. Keep up the great work shave! 

[betamike]

Awesome!!!!  And "wooooo" is a perfect comment to go with any photos taken at SDC!   

[DollarCityBoy]

I have tried several times to upload my photo's of Dollywood. Everything works great, right up into the point I click, "Add Album." Then it takes me to a white screen that says "Invalid Request."

[shavethewhales]

Hmmm, strange, but it looks like it worked. You have three albums, and all of the photos seem to have uploaded correctly. I'll have to investigate that error message, I'm not sure what would cause that...

I'm going to have to put the 'errors may occur' warning back up, but you guys will still be able to add and edit photos (assuming errors don't occur.) Please continue to post if you run into an issue - we'll get this thing sorted out eventually! 

At this point though, I'm investigating third party scripts that might work better. I like coding my own stuff so that I can customize it however I want, but I can see that this thing is going to be a bear to get working reliably for everyone. We'll see what happens though.

[DollarCityBoy]

^ So there are 3 Albums? Where are these albums, because I am sure they need to be edited with descriptions and so forth; along with having 2 of them deleted, because they are probally exact copies of each other.

[shavethewhales]

^Are they not showing up when you go to http://www.sdcfans.com/profile/ ? It looks like all the information entered correctly. All three albums are inactive, so they won't show up on the site until you set them to active. Let me know if they don't show up.