AWSOM Pixgallery FastFlow Usage guide

AWSOM Pixgallery was designed to get your images online as quickly as and easily as possible. The AWSOM FastFlow ™ system makes putting up and displaying your images a snap. Once you have installed Pixgallery on your WordPress blog you can follow these steps to get your images up in minutes:

1) First decide where you want your main Image folder to reside. By default Pixgallery will create a folder for you in the wp-content/uploads folder to use for your images, it is strongly suggested you use this folder area since it allows your WordPress site to be more portable should you ever decide to move it to another server or location. If you do not wish to use this folder it is then strongly suggested that you place the folder at least within the main WordPress folder itself. Folders outside the WordPress folder area will work, but it is not optimal and can require you to use more advanced relative linking (./ and ../) prefixes to your file names and paths. Move any images or folders with images to this folder on your server. Make sure that the images have at least 644 file permissions and and sub folders have 755 permissions.

2) Once you know your image location go to the Appearance (or Design)–>Pixgallery Galleries area and edit the settings for the “Default Gallery” by selecting it from the drop down menu and clicking the edit button. Input the path to your folder into the appropriate field and fill in the name you wish to assign this gallery (the name field is for you to use to remember your different galleries, only the “Custom Name” field or the actual folder name will be displayed to the visitor)

3) Once you have updated this Default Folder you can then select it from the drop down menu and click the “Generate Gallery Code” button to have Pixgallery display the proper code to add to a post or page to have your gallery appear.

4) Write a page or post, and using the Code editor (not the Visual editor) place the code in step 3 into the page where you want to gallery to appear.

5) Your Gallery will now appear in the page and you can move on to adding captions to your images or folders. If you are logged into your site as an admin you will see links at the bottom of folders and images that say either “Edit Caption” or “Add Caption” depending on if you have already sete up a caption. Click these links to go directly to the Caption entry page for either images or folders. In either case the proper path, and for images the file name, are automatically entered into the proper fields for you so all you need to do is add a custom name (optional), caption text, position in gallery (optional–used for the numerical sort display option), and tags (optional–feature coming soon). Once you have entered your desired information click the Update or Add button to add the information to the database. You will then be presented with a link that will allow you to return back to the original image or folder page. In this way you can easily and quickly move through your entire gallery adding in captions.

6) You can add in new images at any time and Pixgallery will automatically integrate them into your existing gallery. Just FTP or move the files into the Gallery folder and they will be detected and thumbnailed for you immediately upon viewing the gallery page.

7) If you want to edit or delete many Image or Folder captions at once go to the Pixgallery Galleries or Pixgallery Image Captions pages and click the “Show all” button for either type. This view will display all of the current captions that exist along with buttons to edit or delete each one. You can then quickly delete or edit captions throughout the list.

8) If you want to play around with the different thumbnail settings or watermarking settings you can easily reset your cache folder to eliminate your older files. On the Pixgallery Image Captions page click the “Delete all Cache Files” button to delete your existing files and have Pixgallery re-create them with your new settings. This is also good to clean up any older files that are no longer being used due to settings changes and keep your file system compacted.

9) If you want to allow people to comment on your images and galleries individually you should turn on the Individual Commenting option in the Options area. This will “sticky” comments to the image or folder being viewed when the comment is entered. The commenting system integrates with your regular comment system, so any anti-spam or other commenting plugins should also work. The best part is your regular protections will protect your image comments as well and WordPress 2.7 nested comments work properly.

Optional Elements
One optional element you may want to try out is using Custom Sub Folder images. By default Pixgallery selects the first image in a subfolder as the image to represent a folder in the thumbnail view, you can alter this to have a specific image represent your folder by placing an image file inside the subfolder named “pxggalleryimage” (it can be a .gif, .jpg, or .png file, it doesn’t matter what type). This image will then be the representative for that folder. It will not show up on it’s own in the gallery thumbnail view of that folder nor will it be visible as a large size image, it will just represent the folder for display.

Using Pixgallery is really as simple as that. As you can see once you understand the process you can have your images up in no time. It’s especially easy to dump large numbers of photos into a gallery and go. You don’t even need to do anything special to have subfolders within your main gallery, just add a new folder within the Main Gallery folder on your server that you set in the Define Gallery step and add images and they will simply appear. You can even have subfolders of subfolders by doing the same thing.

In cases where you want to display a very large number of images inside one folder it is suggested that you set the Options area Gallery Layout setting to a reasonable X by Y number per page and have Pixgallery create subpages with links for you. This makes it easier for people to view your gallery without feeling overwhelmed.