Expo
The Expo contains various galleries, both commercial and private, in which members can display what they wish - works of art for sale, progress with house renovations, new-build house projects, etc

Getting a gallery: Displaying photos uses a lot of disk space and bandwidth so we prefer to open galleries by arrangement. If you have something you would like to display please contact the webmaster with details.

Viewing Pictures: From the main 'Exhibition Hall' you can navigate into any main category, or directly into any of the 'sub-albums' or galleries listed on the right side of the page.

Click on the gallery you want to view. You will be shown 'thumbnail' pictures of the contents. Click any thumbnail for a closer view of the picture. Some pictures may be enlarged by clicking on them again. If a bigger version of the image exists you will be shown it.

Contacting Exhibitors: All exhibitors should have left contact details below their pictures. Failing that, there is a thread with contact details in the Forum.



Administering you own Gallery

Adding photos:
  1. Go to:
    http://www.totalfrance.com/ france/gallery/index.php
  2. Login with the Login Details from the webmaster
  3. Navigate to your gallery (set up for you by the webmaster)
  4. There is a box in the top right-hand corner called 'admin options'
  5. Try adding a photo from your PC by clicking 'add photo' in these options
  6. A dialogue box should appear on your screen. Use it to browse to the picture file on your PC and then click 'upload now'. (Nb see note at bottom of this page about picture formats!!). Be patient while it uploads.
  7. After it has uploaded you will see a thumbnail of the image with a list of options below it. Try editing the title and description for the picture. Play around a little. Enjoy yourself.
  8. Upload other pictures as you wish.


Configuring your Gallery
The admin options in your gallery are as follows:

Add Photo Explained above
Add Photos Add several photos at one time.
Custom Fields Add other text fields, besides Title & Description, to an image
Edit Captions Edit the Title & Description of your pictures in bulk
Properties Adjust the viewing properties of the gallery. Be careful with this as you may make your gallery unviewable, or ugly, or both :)
Rebuild Thumbs Have all the thumbnails remade if you've been changing pictures.
Resize All Resize (downward!) all your main pictures. This should only be necessary if you have uploaded BIG pictures which are taking a long time for users to download
Sort Iitems Change the order of the pictures in your gallery



Personalising Photos:
Below each photo is a list with the following options. Most are self-explanatory:

Edit Text Edit the Title & Description
Edit Thumbnail This may not work on your system
Rotate/Flip Photo Change orientation of picture
Highlight Photo Use this thumbnail as the cover picture for your gallery
Move Photo Move pictures between albums
Reorder Photo Change the picture order
Copy Photo As it says
Hide Photo As it says
Delete Photo As it says



'Preferences' - Exhibition Hall page
(IMPORTANT Please remember, although there is a facility for changing your username and password inside the Expo page, we would prefer that you don't use it. That's because it isn't linked to the other databases on the site, so any changes you make there will not be reflected across the site and could end up with your passwords going out of synchronisation.)


Picture Formats
Although the gallery software is fairly liberal about different picture formats it will accept, please don't use any GIFS for the pictures you put up. Please stick with jpgs or pngs. The reason (apart from GIFS working poorly on multi-tonal images like photos) is because GIFS bloat enormously during manipulation.

All GIFS are generally small in file size because they are in a very 'compressed state'. That compression technology is owned (by Unisys) and licensed out for a huge fee. Proprietary software like PhotoShop makes compressed gifs because it contains the compression software. But most image manipulation software based on web servers doesn't.

So gifs that are uploaded to our gallery are first 'inflated' by the server software, then thumbnails and intermediate pictures are created, but then the gifs cannot be re-compressed. As a consequence, a small gif thumbnail can be up to three times larger in file size than the original picture was!

JPGs, by contrast, can be compressed for free :o)
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