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 AlbumStep 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 AlbumSee 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.