Free-for-All Tattoo Photo Gallery

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Caption Help

Writing the caption text
Open Notepad, or any similar plain text editor and write a short caption for your photo. The caption should be just enough to let people know what they are looking at - 6 to 12 words is usually enough. In any case, please limit your caption to no more than 60 characters. Longer captions mess up the shape of the thumbnails table and give me bad headaches.

Saving the caption to a file
When you're done, save the file as picturename.txt on your hard drive somewhere you can easily find it when you use the "Browse" button. I don't mean it has to be called exactly "picturename.txt", what I mean is it has to be a name with a .txt extension. I know that you, dear reader - yes you grinning at the monitor screen right now - understand what I mean, but there are many dolts out there . . .

If you really really have to use a word processor such as Microsoft Word, make sure you save the file as plain text with a .txt extension. If you save it as a .doc or .rtf or anything else it won't work in the gallery.

Getting the caption file name right
Substitute a unique name of your own for picturename. Steer clear of very obvious names like Tattoo.txt, Myphoto.txt, Runetattoo.txt, John.txt or Mary.txt etc, because a lot of photos will already be in the gallery with names like that. So when you try to upload, the file will automatically get renamed to something else by the script. It will be much better to use something that is likely to be unique, such as jwdoe.txt or marykbell.txt or harry2345.txt. 

Whatever name you choose, don't put any capital letters or spaces or commas, quotes or any of that weird stuff in the name. Just use lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores. F'rinstance if you wanted to call the file "John Doe's Tattoo" you should use john_does_tattoo.txt or john-does-tattoo.txt or even johndoestattoo.txt instead.

If you make a mistake
If you get something wrong, don't worry. The script will tell you what the problem is and how to fix it. And if you do somehow manage to blow up the whole gallery, I won't send you a runic fizzer to rot your genitals. Not until you've blown it up at least twice, anyway.

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Photo Help

Photo file types
The gallery only accepts JPG picture files. That's file names that end in .jpg or .jpeg or .jpe.

If your photo is in some other format (e.g. GIF, BMP, WMF, PNG, TIFF) then you will have to convert it to a JPG file. You can do this in most photo editing, drawing or graphics applications.

If your photo is a JPG, JPEG or JPE - make a copy
Browse to your photo file using My Computer or Windows Explorer. Copy the file and paste the copy in the same directory where you saved the caption file. Then rename the pasted copy to the same name as the caption file.

If your photo is any other kind of file  - convert the photo
If you haven't had much experience of messing around with images, try this:

• Open up My Computer or Windows Explorer and browse to the photo.

• Click on the file icon or name. When it opens up in any kind of application window, try to right-click on the image and see if you get a "save as..." option in the context menu.

• At the bottom of the "save as..." dialog box there is usually a drop-down menu called "Save as file type". JPG or JPEG will almost certainly be one of the options. Select the JPG or JPEG option and save the file.

• If your system has Windows Picture and Fax Viewer installed you can use keys CTRL and S to get the "save as..." dialog. Alternatively, you can click the little floppy disk icon at the bottom of the Window.

Simple alternative - use Easy Image Converter
If you can't be bothered with all that messing around, here is a really simple solution. Visit this URL: http://www.homeplansoftware.com/imgconv.htm and download Easy Image Converter. It's a free program about 450Kb in size, so it only takes a minute to download.

• Install it on your hard drive and run the program.

• It has two fields, input and output.

• Click the Load Input Image button to browse to your photo file.

• Select the JPG radio button. Then click the Convert button. Up comes the "save as" dialog box.

• Browse to the folder where you want the new .jpg file to be saved.

• Click on Save and the job's done. Finished already? Gee, that was quick!

Getting the photo file name right
This is important: The photo file name has to be exactly the same as the caption file name. So for example if your caption file is called johndoestattoo.txt, then the photo file has to be called johndoestattoo.jpg. If the names are not the same, the caption won't appear on the gallery page.

Did you get through all that? Great! Now you are ready to upload your files to the Gallery. Go for it!

Note for Mac Users:
Sorry, I have no idea how to do these things on a Mac. If you know and are willing to tell me, I will be very grateful. "How grateful will you be, Bob?". Gee, I dunno, maybe I'll give something away...

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