Mimetic Galleries

Many people want a gallery with their own domain name (such as “www.mydomain.com”). To do this, you must “point” your domain name to our website servers. This is done by

1. Asking Mimetic Galleries to set up an account for you, and
2. Changing the “nameserver”, which you do from the website which sold you the domain name.

For example, let’s say I have the name “atelius.com”, and I want it to show a gallery. First, I order a Private or Group account from Mimetic Galleries. Please note, this isn’t the same as the Personal Account you can get when you sign up online.*

Next, after my new gallery is set up, I go to the website where I bought the name, which is www.verio.com. There, I log into my account. I see my domain name — atelius.com — and I see a popup menu of commands. One command is “Edit Namerservers”. I choose that.

Next, I see a small form, with between two and four boxes. Only the first two matter.

Into the box, “Nameserver 1″ I write:  ns1.frontine-photos.com

Into the box, “Nameserver 2″ I write: ns2.frontine-photos.com

That’s all I do. It can take 24 hours before the world recognizes the changes, but when it does, anyone who writes “atelius.com” into their browser will be taken to a gallery.

_____

* When the Mimetic Galleries creates a Private or Group account for you, you get your own server account, with email, FTP, and everything. Setting this up is a complicated, custom procedure that requires hours of back-breaking work, years of arcane training, magical incantations, and liters of coffee.

Your gallery has always allowed you to send it pictures by email. However, you had to caption the picture properly, as if you were sending it to an agency.

Now, it’s much easier! To send a picture to the gallery:

• Make a new email message, and attach your picture (it must be a JPG format picture, not Photoshop or TIFF).
• Write the nickname of the exhibition in the email Subject (if blank or unrecognized, the picture will go into your portfolio exhibition).
• Add any information, such as the title or caption (see below).
• Send the email…
  • Private gallery: If you have a private gallery in your own domain (e.g. yourdomain.com), then email the picture to pix@yourdomain.com.
  • Public gallery: If you have an account at mimetic.com (or another shared, public gallery), then email the picture to pix@mimetic.com (or the name of your public gallery).

You can set the nickname of your exhibition by editing your exhibition, then clicking on Show/Hide Advanced Features. Below the title is the field, “Nickname.” Use a simple word you can remember — if your exhibition is called “Fishing in Afghanistan,” you might write “fishing” for the nickname.

I’ve created an exhibition called “Snapshots” where I can send pictures from my camera phone (it’s an iPhone). Take a peek at www.davidgrossphoto.com/gallery.php?ProjectID=156.

About Security

Can anyone send a picture this way? No. The gallery only accepts pictures from email addresses it recognizes. If you send a picture to the gallery from an email account that isn’t the one in your profile, the gallery won’t accept it right away. Instead, it will look inside the picture, for IPTC caption information. If it can’t find a match for the credit/byline/author, it dumps the email message.

Adding Title, Caption, Date…

You can also add information to your picture. In your email message, you can write any IPTC field information you want. In particular, you can add a title, caption, date, city, and country to the picture. Just write the field name you want (e.g. “Caption”), followed by a “:”, then your text.

Below are the fields you can use. You can use one, or all, as you wish. Extra text in the message will be ignored, so don’t worry about your email signature.

Fields You Can Use:

Title: The title of the picture. You can also use the word, “Headline”.

Caption or Description: The caption or description of the picture.

Date: The date the picture was taken, written this way: YYYY-MM-DD. For example, write “2009-07-05″ for “July 5, 2009″.

Author or Byline or Credit: The creator of the picture, usually your name.

City: City where the picture was taken.

State: State or province where the picture was taken.

Country: Country where the picture was taken.

Example:

To: pix@mimetic.com
Subject: fishing

Title: Man Fishing in River
Caption: An Afghan man fishes for catfish in the Wazir river at sunset.
Date: 2009-07-05
Credit: David I. Gross
City: Kabul
Country: Afghanistan

From my iPhone....

Anyone can subscribe to your RSS feeds and be notified of any changes to your exhibitions. Simple send people to

feed://yourdomain.com/rss.php

and they’ll see your RSS feed. What’s really cool is that it works on the iPhone, too. Anyone with an RSS app, such as Free RSS, can see your new pictures right away.

We’ve added three new themes for gallery pages, featuring big resizing pictures: Big Picture Left, Big Picture Across, and Picture Right. These themes are designed for gallery listings. They match the default theme, but they show a large picture from the gallery that will resize to fit the screen. It’s a nice compromise with the Picture Background Resizing theme, which fills the whole screen but can obscure text.

We’ve turned on live editing for the #container setting, so you can start messing around with margins, padding, and other aspects of the main area of a theme. Give it a try.

You can create a custom menu for each gallery instead of using the built-in menu. A custom menu can include the built-in menu items, such as a drop-down menu of new exhibitions or a link to your blog. A custom menu can also include any text you wish, such as HTML code to link to another website, or even plain text.

Hint: See the sample, below, for Custom Item 1 to see how to make a link to another website. Replace “www.mywebsite.com” with the name of your website. Replace “My Web Site” with the text you want to show in the menu bar.

Let’s say, you want a menu item that links to another website, www.mywebsite.com. And, you’d like a second menu item that doesn’t do anything but show the text, “All pictures copyright © 2009 by David Gross”. 

In the Administration of your website, choose the Galleries tab.  Click “Edit” for the gallery you want to edit. Then, click “Show/Hide Advanced Features” to see the custom menu settings.

Fill in the “Menu Bar Custom Items”, as shown.

When you save, you might notice that the system has changed your copyright symbol to an HTML code for the symbol, as shown below. This is OK.

Here’s a sample custom menu bar. This will show a link to all exhibitions in the gallery, your custom menu item #1, and custom menu item #2.

Your viewers will see this:

The best way to draw people to your gallery is through social networking. Many people share their favorite websites using Twitter, Digg, Delicius, and other social networking sites.

We’ve learned that just being mentioned in a popular blog can draw thousands of viewers — people who might otherwise miss your exhibition.

Here’s how to add a sharing menu to your menu bar. You will be changing the menu bar for an entire gallery, not just one exhibition inside a gallery.

Go to your administration pages, and click on the Galleries tab. Chose Edit to the far right of the name of the gallery you want to change, and you’ll see an Edit Gallery form. Then, click on Show/Hide Advanced Features. This will let you edit the menu bar.

Click the checkbox before Use custom menu bar?

You can chose each menu item in your menu. Make the last item Share.

Click on Save when you’re done. If you look at your gallery, you’ll the Share item in your menu bar. It’s the one with the “+” in a box.

That’s all you have to do, and people will be able to tell their friends and followers about your exhibition with a single click.

If your captions don’t look right because you see weird characters, your have a “character set” problem. Different computers use different “character sets” to show English, Polish, Russian, Chinese and other languages. However, picture captioning is not smart — it often does not know what language you used to write your caption.

If you’re seeing words like “itÕs” instead of “it’s”, then the software you used to add captions to your pictures did not use the most standard character set, called “UTF-8″. 

For example, Photoshop CS2 on a Macintosh, uses “Mac OS Roman” characters. Because many photographers use Macintosh, the system will guess “Mac OS Roman”.

All this means that Windows users will have trouble if their captioning software doesn’t record which character set it uses. Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture use UTF-8, so both should work well. 

This system tries its best to figure out what characters your captioning software used. If you see strange characters, the problem is your captioning software. Unless you can tell your software to save IPTC caption information as UTF-8, you’ll have to fix the captions in the Mimetic Gallery system, under the “Pictures” tab.

There are two new catalog pages you can use. They use the SlideShowPro gallery page, a fantastic Flash viewer that we use to show slide shows. The new catalog pages, called “All Shows” and “Catalog”, will show all exhibitions in your gallery.

Catalog

Both “Catalog” and “All Shows” can be added to the menu bar of a gallery. Catalog shows a grid of exhibitions on the same kind of page as you would see a list of exhibitions. “All Shows” shows the same grid of exhibitions, but on a slide show page. Both let the viewer watch a slide show of an exhibition.

All Shows

Only those of you with personal websites, or have Administrator control over a website, can add these functions. If you don’t have such power, ask your gallery owner for help.

How to add Catalog and/or All Shows to your menu bar:

1. Sign in as Administrator to the admin page.
2. Click on the “Galleries” tab.
3. Click “Edit” to the right the gallery to which you want to add Catalog or All Shows.
4. Check the “Use custom menu bar” checkbox by clicking once on the box.
5. In a menu item popup box, choose “catalog” to show the “Catalog”. Choose “all shows” to show ”All Shows”.
6. Click the “Save” button.

Now, when you open up that gallery, you’ll see a menu bar with “Catalog” and/or ”All Shows”.

The Mimetic Galleries system is optimized so that it will show up well in a Google search. You can improve how Google finds and shows your exhibition pages.

If you own a gallery, be sure to write a description for it. That description will show up in Google.

If you have any exhibitions, be sure to write a statement and a description for each one. The statement and description will show up in Google.

On your profile page, be sure to write a short biography. This will show up in Google.