What Is It, and Why Should I Care?
You can use the new CCC Gallery to manage the images you want to post on the Forum, and to save the images you use in your Profile Signature. You will need to make sure the images don’t exceed the current maximum file size as listed in the Gallery, but the Gallery will check the file size for you and tell you if they’re too large before you add them, so you don’t have to try to figure out how to find the file size on your own, or waste time waiting for a huge file to upload only to get an error message. The new Gallery will resize and optimize your images for the Forum so you don’t have to. The optimized images will load faster than attached files or remotely hosted files, making the Forum work faster and more smoothly, using fewer resources. The images in the CCC Gallery are saved on the CCC server and delivered encrypted, so there won’t be any of those nasty “insecure content” messages from your browser if all the images on a page are from the new Gallery. The images in the Gallery can be reused, so unlike attached files, they’ll take much less space on the server. Finally, the images you add to the Gallery can be searched, making it easier to find images about topics you’re interested in, new candidates for the Ride of the Month, or an image to illustrate your point in a post.
Getting There
To use the CCC Gallery, you must be a registered user of the Forum, and logged in. After that, simply click the “Gallery” link in the menu bar of the Forum. (If you’re logged in, it will be the leftmost link to the left of your username.)
Welcome To the New Gallery
When you click the Gallery link in the Forum, the Gallery will open in a new window/tab to make it easy to use without losing your place in the Forum. The first thing you see may surprise you. If you used the old gallery years ago, all your albums and images have been imported into the new Gallery. Whether or not you used the old gallery, when you first enter the Gallery, you’ll be taken to the Albums page. You’ll start off in your “Private” album.
Manage Albums
The home page of the Gallery is your Albums page. Your first album will be your “Private” album. Images you add to your Private album can be used in your signature or in posts on the Forum, but they won’t appear in Gallery Search results. (See Searching the Gallery below for more information on search functions.) Your Private album is the perfect place to put images you want to use in your Profile Signature for the Forum.
View, Edit, or Delete Albums
If you created albums in the old Gallery, you can view them by using the drop-down on the Albums page. Once you select an album other than your Private album, you will see buttons to Edit and Delete the album. Your Private album can’t be renamed or deleted, unlike albums you add. Make sure you add good titles and descriptions for your albums so that other users can find your albums in Search results.
If you delete an album, all the images in that album will be moved to your Private album. The images in the album will not be deleted.
Add Albums
Add albums when you add new images, on the “Add Images” page using the “Add Album” button. You can add more than one album at a time; the Gallery will automatically switch to the last album you added. Click “Done,” hit the Esc key, or click the “X” in the upper-right corner of the “Add Album” dialog to close it when you’re done adding albums.
Managing Images In the Gallery
Add Images
To add images to the Gallery, first click the “Add Images” menu item in the menu bar of the Gallery. At the top of the page, you will see instructions on adding images that include information about the image file types and maximum file size allowed for the Gallery. As long as your image is one of the allowed types and below the maximum file size listed, you don’t need to worry about resizing/scaling the image or optimizing it for the Forum. The Gallery will do that for you.
Select the album you want to add the images to from the Select Album drop-down, or click the “Add Album” button to add a new album. Click the Browse button to select the image from your computer or mobile device, then fill out the title and description for the image in the boxes provided for each image you are adding. Adding a good title and description for each image is essential if you want your images to show up in search results. Click the Submit button at the bottom of the Add Images page to finish adding the images.
Edit An Image
You can edit an image–change the album it’s in, its title, or its description–by clicking its thumbnail in the album in which you’ve saved it, then clicking the Edit button at the bottom of the Image Details box (in the right column on Desktop PCs, and below the image on mobile devices).
Delete An Image
Delete an image by clicking its thumbnail in the album in which you’ve saved it, then clicking the Delete button at the bottom of the Image Details box (in the right column on Desktop PCs, and below the image on mobile devices). Note that deleting an image removes it from the album you’ve saved it in, and it will no longer appear in Search results, but it will not delete the image itself from the server, or from any Forum posts you’ve used it in.
Add An Image From the Gallery to a Forum Post
To add a Gallery image to a post:
- Copy the Image Link from any image in the Gallery. The Image Links are listed below each image thumbnail and on the Image Details page for each image.
- Back in the Forum post editor, make sure the cursor is in the location of your post where you want the image, then click the “CCCGallery” tag button on the editor toolbar. (It’s to the left of the Youtube tag button.)
- Paste the Image Link you copied from the Gallery between the CCCGallery tags in the Forum editor so it looks similar to the following (the numbers will vary depending on the image you selected):
[CCCGallery]800|602|429.jpg[/CCCGallery]
That’s it! Click the Preview button at the bottom of the Forum editor if you want to make sure the image displays before publishing your post.
Directly Link to an Album
When you’re logged in and viewing one of your albums–other than your Private album–you’ll see a “Direct Link” which you can use to link to a visitors’ page where someone can view the album even if they aren’t a Forum user or logged in. It should work pretty well for showing off a car you want to sell, for example.
Once at the visitors’ page for the album, it’s possible to view a list of all a user’s albums by clicking on their hyperlinked username, or to view individual images by clicking on the image. The visitors’ page uses regular URLs, so all the pages are direct links.
Searching the Gallery
To search the Gallery, click the “Search” menu item on the menu bar of the Gallery. Enter some search keywords in the “Search For” box and/or a Forum user’s username in the “Limit To User” box. You can search for keywords or a user, or both. Using the “Method” drop-down, select the method you want to use to search. “Any words” will give the most results, with “all words” and “exact phrase” giving increasingly specific results. Use the “Search In” drop-down to search either albums or images. Click the “Search” button to run your search.
Note that if you haven’t added appropriate titles and descriptions for your albums and images, they won’t appear in search results.
Once you’ve completed a search, you can hide the Search form by clicking the “^” button at the top-right of the Search form, then restore it by clicking the down-arrow when you need the form again.
Album Search
If you set the “Search In” drop-down to “albums,” and the Gallery found any matches, it will tell you how many matches were found, how many are displayed, and will list the albums’ titles, creation dates, owners, and descriptions.
Click the album’s title to view the images in the album. You can return to your search results from an album or an album’s images by clicking the Search menu item or by clicking the Search button to re-run your search.
Click the album owner’s username to view all albums owned by that user. You can return to your search results from an album or an album’s images by clicking the Search menu item or by clicking the Search button to re-run your search.
Image Search
If you set the “Search In” drop-down to “images,” and the Gallery found any matches, it will tell you how many matching images were found and will show you the thumbnail of each image.
Click the thumbnail of an image to view the full-sized image and its details. You can return to your search results by clicking the “Back to Images” button from an Image Details page.
Logging Out of the Gallery
Logging out of the Gallery isn’t necessary, but you can do so if you click the Logout menu item in the menu bar. Doing so will log you out of the Gallery, but not the Forum, and discard any saved searches, image- or album-selections, but if you remain logged in to the Forum, you can return to the Gallery and it will reopen for you.