Working with Photo Albums in Sandvox

Introduction

Sandvox provides tools to make it easy for you to create and maintain a photo album or gallery. This article is designed to serve as a guide to getting the most out of this functionality.

Sandvox also has the ability to create a Photo Weblog. This is a hybrid of a Photo Album and a Weblog. Photos are laid out in a grid, but are timestamped and arranged in reverse chronological order. A Photo Weblog also has an RSS feed and allows comments.

Create the Album

First, we must create the photo album.

Select a suitable page in the Site Outline (such as the Home Page).
Click the "Collections" item in the toolbar and select "Photo Album."
Open the Page Inspector and give the album a title.
Change the text of the new Photo Album page to provide a description of the album. If you wish, you can leave this bit blank.

Congratulations, you now have a new photo album!

Adding Photos

Adding photos to the album is also very easy. There are two alternative methods:

Method 1:

Locate a photo for the album in the Media Browser, Finder, or another application.
Drag the image and drop it on the photo album in the Site Outline:

Method 2:

Select the photo album in the Site Outline.
Click the "Pages" item in the toolbar and select "Photo Page."
Select the new Photo page in the Site Outline.
Open the Selection Inspector.
Drag your photo into the box in the Inspector.

You can also add Movies to a photo album using either of the methods above.

Having created the basic Photo page by either of the above methods, you should also:

Use the Page Inspector to give the photo an appropriate title.
Use the Selection Inspector to give the photo a description for those who cannot see the image in their browser.
Click the Editing Marker () to give the photo a suitable caption.

If you created the Photo page using method 1, Sandvox automatically fills in as many of these properties as it can for you.

Arranging Photos

Of course, once you've got some photos into the Album, you'll probably want to arrange them. As ever, Sandvox makes this super easy; Just drag the individual Photo pages around in the Site Outline:

If you like, you can set Sandvox to automatically arrange the photos for you.

To set the photo album to be automatically sorted:

Select the album in the Site Outline.
Open the Page Inspector.
Click the "Collection" disclosure triangle to reveal the full Collection settings.
Make your choice with the "Sorting" popup:

You can have your photos arranged alphabetically by their title, or by date.

Browsing the Album

When viewing a Photo or Movie page in an album, Sandvox conveniently provides navigational controls like this:

Use the left and right arrows to move to the previous or next photo or movie. Use the middle button to return to the album's index where you can see thumbnails of everything in the album.

Further Ideas

RSS Feeds

If you are using a photo album in such a manner that its content regularly changes (e.g. an album of your most recent photos or simply a random selection), then you may wish to add an RSS feed to it. By doing so, visitors can subscribe to the feed and be easily notified when new photos are added.

To set a photo album to generate an RSS feed:

Select the album in the Site Outline.
Open the Page Inspector.
Click the "Collection" disclosure triangle to reveal the full Collection settings.
Check the "Generate RSS feed" box.

For more information on how to find the address of the feed, please see the "RSS Feed" article.

Comments

You could add the ability for visitors to leave comments about a photo.

To enable comments for a photo album:

As described in the "Comments" article, enable comments for the site.
Select the first existing Photo page in the photo album by clicking it in the Site Outline.
Open the Page Inspector.
Check the box labeled "Enable reader comments."
Repeat steps 2-4 for each of the Photos in the album.
Select the photo album in the Site Outline.
Open the Page Inspector.
Click the disclosure triangle labeled "Collection" at the bottom of the Inspector to reveal the full Collection settings.
Check the box labeled "Allow comments."

You could also consider using a Photo Weblog instead.

Cat image courtesy of stock.xchng