Free Website Builder

Our December release was full of new stuff, however one of the biggest changes was the introduction of new image management tools.  Some of these more advanced features are deep in the system so I thought I'd spend some time going over them.

New Album Viewer & Album Inserter

Previously you had two main options for putting images on your website, the Album Page and uploading single images using the editor.  Other than renaming the Album Page to the "Gallery" the existing features haven't changed much.  However, we have introduced a powerfull new way to insert albums anywhere on your website.

In the new editor next to the "Insert Image" button you'll see "Insert Album".  Clicking on that will give you a list of albums that you can click to insert into your page.  In the editor you'll see a temporary placeholder image, but once you save you'll see a grid of small thumbnails like this:

or like this if you want larger thumbnails:

Not only can you change thumbnail sizes, but you an select how many thumbnails to show. You can even change the grid of thumbnails to a single icon like this:

Clicking on a thumbnail will bring up the new Album Viewer where you can click through all of the images in the album, see the description and even start a slideshow. The album viewer comes in two sizes: large and small. Those people who have larger monitor and/or higher resolution settings can change to the larger view if they wish. We think everyone will get a lot of great use out of this new tool, I know Heath and I had a lot of fun playing with it.

Image Library

Sometimes the Gallery page just isn't enough when it comes to managing your libraries, and some people don't use it at all.  We created a new Image Library tool where you can manage all of your Images and Albums.  To get there just click "Images" on the main menu in the Administration area.

Here you can upload, manage, delete and search for any image on your website independent of albums or pages.

Click on the "Albums" sub-menu to manage all of your albums.  Now when you create a new album you can add images you've already uploaded as well as upload new images.  We also added an advanced re-ordering system that will let easily move images to specific positions in your album.

Image Editing Tools

When you upload or edit an image you'll notice some new buttons under the image preview.  These tools will let you Rotate, Crop or convert the image to Black & White.  There's also a Thumb Cropper that will let you choose what you want the thumbnail to look like instead of the system just automatically centering it.

We're very excited about these new tools and hope they'll make managing images on your website more enjoyable.