Gallery index window

This window serves two main functions. It allows you to load/organize new pictures and adjust Index page layout. When you add pictures to the gallery you can immediately see how your index page will look like.

Adding/organizing images

The first step in the creation of a new gallery is adding your picture files to the gallery. You can add an individual file or multiple files (the "Add files" button) or an entire folder - the "Add Folder" button.

The "Add pictures" button lets you add an individual file or several files to the gallery. Locate files on the disk, select desired file(s) and click "Ok". Selected pictures will be added to the gallery. The "Add pictures" dialog shows a preview of image files.

The "Add directory" button allows you to add the contents of an entire folder and all sub-folders (the "recursive" checkbox). Please note, that the recursive mode can add a lot of pictures to your gallery. When you select a folder in the "Add directory" dialog, the application starts counting image files in the folder (and all sub-folders in the recursive mode). Please check this number to make sure you add a reasonable number of pictures to your gallery. There is no limitation on number of pictures in the gallery, but it's just difficult to organize a huge number of images, and the build process could take a long time to complete.

The "Index" window consists of the main area with picture thumbnails, where you can preview and move images and page selector.

The Page selector lets you switch between Index pages (just click the desired page in the page selector). It also shows the total number of index pages and the current page number.

The Image area shows a preview of the gallery index page. It displays picture thumbnails with a layout specified by various gallery index page settings.
The Image area allows user to organize pictures in the gallery, i.e. specify the image order (sort pictures in the gallery), move pictures between index pages and within one page. You can select a picture by clicking it, Drag the picture with the mouse to move the thumbnail to the desired location. If you want to move a picture to another page just drag it onto the page in the page selector (you'll see the current page in image area), then drag to the image area and drop it. You can select several images (Ctrl-Click adds image to the selection, Shift-Click adds all images up to the current image to the selection) and then drag the entire selection to a new location or a new page.

Thumbnails preview mode
You can preview the gallery with thumbnail effects or without them. The first mode is much faster because it doesn't require complex image processing for each thumbnail image in the index page. The second mode is slower but it gives you a better understanding of how good your gallery looks. (And we believe it looks really great!). You can switch between these two modes in application preferences.

Sorting
You can sort pictures in the index page. The default setting leaves the pictures unsorted, i.e. displayed in the order they were added to the gallery. Select "Gallery/Sort By" in the application menu to change the sorting mode. Gena supports four sorting modes:

• Name - Sort alphabetically by image file Name
• Path - Sort alphabetically by full Path to image file
• Date - Sort by image file modification Date
• Size - Sort by image file Size

When the user changes the picture order manually (by dragging an image to a new place) Gena disables the sorting mode and the pictures become unsorted.

You can also sort pictures in two sub-modes: Forward and Reverse. "Forward" means normal, ascending sort order (A to Z, lower values first, etc), "Reverse" means descending order (Z to A, higher values first, etc).

Index page settings

Title

You can specify the Gallery Title here. By default, the Gallery title is included as a page title in every index page. (But you can override this behavior in Advanced settings).

Rows/Columns

The Index page is essentially a table with thumbnails representing gallery images. You can specify the number of rows and columns in this table.

Gallery style
You can select between four gallery styles:

Table - index is organized as a table of thumbnails. When user clicks on the thumbnail, the full-size picture is opened in another browser window (example) Left frame - index and image are located in separate html frames, index is in the left part of the browser window, image is located in right part. (example) Top frame - index and image are located in separate html frames, index is in the upper part of the browser window, image is located in lower part. Bottom frame - index and image are located in separate html frames, index is in the lower part of the browser window, image is located in upper part.

When you change gallery style, the application adjusts the number of rows/columns in the thumbnail table. The default value for frame-based styles is one row (or one column) of thumbnails, but you can always override the default setting.

Navigation

The Navigation control allows the user to specify navigation links layout and pictures for navigation buttons in index pages. Click the layout string to select it from the drop-down list or click the current set of buttons to change them. Different layouts and Navigation Buttons control are explained here.