Mimetic Galleries

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.

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.