There are couple of ways to upload photos to TRW (the Railwire).
- Upload photos (or few other types of documents to the post). This method permanently links the uploaded photo (or document) with the specific post. So, it is not very flexible. Also, rather important limitation is the fact that the photo (or document) is only visible or accessible to the registered users who are logged into the forum
- Upload photos to the user's photo gallery. By using this method the photos are hosted in the forum's user gallery. Those photos can then be linked to any post and are also easily viewed by the owner or by other members of the forum. They are also visible to non-registered viewers of the forum. The gallery also allows for creating categories and sub-categories (similar to folders ans sub-folders on other photo hosting sites) so photos can be neatly organized by their owner. The photos also can easily be moved between categories at any time after upload while the URL for each photo remains unchanged. NOTE: You need at least 25 posts to be able to use the photo gallery.
To me it makes sense to upload photos to the user gallery and then link them to posts. That seems to be the most flexible method which I use now. This tutorial provides instructions for creating personal gallery and uploading photos. TRW's user interface for uploading photos is a bit non-intuitive (different from other photo hosting sites, mostly due to the different naming convention), but once you go through the process of uploading few photos it will become more intuitive. To confuse things a bit further, there are 2 ways to upload photos to your TRW gallery. One is the (
ADD PICTURE) method which uploads them all into a one unmanageable "GENERAL" gallery "bucket", and the other option is to upload them to a specific user's gallery which can be easily managed. I started using the first method when the gallery was initially made available, but once I learned how to create new gallery categories it made no sense to use the first method of just dumping them all into one "GENERAL" location. This tutorial will only cover the second method.
Before you start to create your gallery, click on the
Gallery button on top of any page (
https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?action=gallery ), click on
User Galleries, then browse some of the galleries. Click
here for mine. You will see that the top level of my gallery contains multiple categories (folders). If you click on any of the categories, you will then see either photos uploaded to that category, more sub-categories, or both.
For example, my
Misc. category contains photos and sub-categories with more photos in each. This makes organizing your photos easy. Each category can be easily renamed, more categories or sub-categories can be added at any time and photos can be moved easy between all the categories. Once you understand that gallery categories are equivalent to
folders then things make sense. At least that's how it worked for me.
Let's start by creating a category in your gallery.
Once you are in your gallery page click on
Gallery, then
MYGALLERY.
Once in your gallery click on
Add Category.
Title is the name of the category (folder) you are creating. It can be changed at a later time if needed (without affecting the links to the photos inside).
Parent category can be selected once you start creating sub-categories. That way you can place a new category under another category. Again, think of this as folders and sub-folders.
All the other fields can left blank (can be edited later if one so chooses). Once the category is added, you go to your gallery view.
Now click on the freshly created gallery name to enter (still empty) category.
Here you can Add Sub Categories, Bulk Add Pictures, or Add a picture (one at a time). The bulk upload is the easiest to use. Click on
Bulk Add Pictures.
Now all you have to do is drag-drop photos (either one or multiple) into the blank area. Once you drop the photos in there you will see the download in progress and it will show icons of the images when the download is complete. At that point you can either drop more photos there, or when finished click on either of the fields circled in red to return to the gallery category where the photos were uploaded.
NOTE: TRW does not retain the original file names when they are uploaded, but during bulk uploads it automatically populates the photo's Title field with the original file name..
This is the view of the category where the photo was just uploaded.
The second method of uploading photos is one at a time. Click on the circled link. That opens
Add Picture page.
Click on the
Browse button and a new windows pops up. In that window browse to where the photo to be uploaded resides, click on it and click
Open. That populates the
Picture field with the photo's file name.
Add the title to your image.
TRW does not retain the original file names when they are uploaded so I like to put the original file name in the Title field.All the other fields can be left blank.
Next click on the
Add Picture button towards the bottom of the page. That will upload the photo to the selected gallery and return you to the gallery page.
Now you see the uploaded photos in that gallery. Click on one of the photos. That will bring up a page showing that photo.
On the bottom of the page there is the BB link code which is used on TRW. Just copy the link and later you can paste it directly into you post. To go back to the gallery click on
Return to Gallery.
Once you created your basic structure of at least one category in your gallery you can now quickly upload photos there directly while composing a new post or replying to a post.
If you are planning on starting a new topic or a post which will contain photos, to be better organized I recommend to go to the gallery first, before you start the post, and create the appropriate new category which will house the photos. That way the photos will be neatly organized. Or upload them to one of the previously created categories.
In this example I will start a new thread and I will be placing the photos in
My N scale layout gallery category I used in the example above.
Start a new topic or reply to a post in a thread. That opens the post editor.
Click on the
Add image to post and upload to gallery link. That opens a new window.
This window provides 2 options: top one (Add Picture) uploads the photo just to the post. As I mentioned in the beginning this is not the best way to upload photos. The bottom option (User Gallery) will automatically upload the photo to the selected gallery category and will also insert a link to that photo into your post. As the above screen capture shows, first browse to the image you want to upload, type in the
Title (I just copy/paste the original file name), and select the gallery category for the upload. In this example we only created one category (My N scale layout). But if your gallery has multiple categories then the pulldown will allow you to choose any of the existing categories. But you cannot create a new category at this level. That is why I recommended going to the gallery and creating a new category (if needed) before starting a post. When done here click on
Add Picture. The photo is then uploaded to the selected galley category and the link shows up in the text editing window at the current cursor location.
The link to your photo uploaded to the gallery is now inserted into the post. This process can be repeated multiple times. Each new uploaded photos link will show up at the last cursor location in the text editing window.
When you go to the gallery, all the uploaded photos will be there.
HINT: When I'm composing a long post with multiple photos (like one of my technical reviews), I prepare the text of the post and all the photos offline, on my computer. Then I open 2 tabs in my browser. The first tab will be for composing my Railwire post and the 2nd tab will point to my Railwire gallery where I'll be for uploading all the photos and then getting their URL codes. In the gallery tab I first create a new category (folder) which will house the photos (or just point the browser to the category where I'll upload the photos. Now I perform a bulk upload of all the photos for my post in that. 2nd tab.
I then start composing my post in the 1st tab and whenever I need to insert a photo I just go to the 2nd tab, find the photo I need, and copy the BB code from there to my post composer in the 1st tab. That makes things easier and quicker than trying to do everything in a single browser tab.
This method makes things easier even if you only have a single or couple of photos to be inserted into the post being composed.
UPDATESince Tom now prefers for us to use the gallery instead of uploading photos to individual posts, here is a quick and dirty way to do that. This method is for members who are not interested in creating a gallery structure - it will upload all the photos to one "bucket" in their default gallery space.
This method is presented as a comparison between attaching photos to a post (the old way) and uploading them to a default gallery (
preferred method).
First, the "old way".
There are 3 steps involved -- you are quite familiar with this method.
Well, here it the
new way Tom wants us to utilize (uploading the photos to the gallery).
The only additional step in this new gallery-upload method is to give the photo a title. You can just type in a single random character in the Subject field (although it would be nice to give it some useful name). Is this really that much more difficult?
