How to upload media
The previous article on “How to import media in Bulk” is useful when you just want to bulk transfer media into TNG from your TNG media collection subfolders:- no titles, no descriptions, no links to individuals. But what if you want to transfer images from your home computer to your TNG site and also be able to tag them at the same time with the titles, descriptions and people links? This is what “Upload Media” can do for you.
Lets say you have a number of images stored away on your home computer that you want to have in TNG. First, check that the images are where you expect to find them, that they are of a size and file type you want, and that you know who or what is in each image, because you are going to be able to assign them to people and places. Then decide what collection best suits storing the images. Review of the article What is media? if you are not sure. Also check in the collection folder to be sure you won’t be uploading a duplicate media file into the same media collections folder.
Caution. If you have already uploaded “grandad.jpg,” for example, and then mistakenly upload the same file again, TNG automatically senses the file name conflict and renames the new file as “granddad (1).jpg”. This means you will have a duplicate media file in that media collection. Although this is not a real problem for TNG, it does take up unnecessary space. But, as a different example, lets say you have created a word document that summarizes your One-Name Study, named overview.doc, which is linked to your TNG home page. At some point in the future, you revise that document, also with overview.doc as the file name, and then upload the updated version to TNG. TNG senses that this file name is already in use, so it automatically renames this new version overview (2).doc. But, your home page is still linking to overview.doc, so there is no link to the new version. So, you need to remember to also change the link on your home page to reflect the new file name. However, a better approach, particularly since you may be uploading new versions many, many times, is to first delete the old version. If you have a FTP account, that is easy to do. If you do not have a ftp account, realize that deleting the file from the TNG media table only deletes the icon from TNG, it DOES NOT delete the actual file UNLESS the “Remove physical file on delete:” option in the Media section of the Setup >> Configuration >> General Settings page has been set to either Yes or On Request.
To start the media upload, go to Administration and click on the Media tile. Click on the “Upload” tab.
Your first choice is picking a collection. Select the collection that should house the media that are about to be uploaded to TNG. I am going to upload a few photos of my grandfather, so my Collection will be Photos.
Then you can select a tree, or not. You do not have to select a tree, but if you expect to have a lot of images in your TNG, this helps keep the display of images more manageable. I will be selecting Tree = Benedict. Okay, we are now ready to bring granddad into the TNG site. We do that with the “Add files…” button.
Ignore the “Folder” text box for now; that will be discussed in a future tutorial.
Shown above is a file browser window showing my computer files, opened on top of the TNG Upload Media page. Note that I have selected my collection and tree. Then by clicking on the ”Add files…” button, I can see choices of images on my home computer. You might have to select the correct computer subfolder to find the images you want.
There are a few shortcuts to selecting multiple images. You could click on them one at a time, click the Open button, then go back to the Add files button and do it again. Or, you can click on the first image you want from the subfolder, and then hold down the control key (Ctrl on a PC) and click on the other images until all are selected. Then release the control key and click on “Open”.
Most browsers (not older Internet Explorer) will also allow you to drag and drop files from another window directly onto the white area in the middle of the Upload Media screen.
If successful, you should see your images appearing in the Media Upload screen (right).
All looks good at this point. So now, if you want to delete a file that shouldn’t be uploaded at this time, use the ”’Cancel”’ button to the right of the image. If you want to upload only one image now, click on the ”’Start”’ button to the right of that image.
At the bottom of the screen, you can associate all of the images with an individual in your family, which is my situation: my grandfather, Peter George Benedict. I will set Tree = Benedict, Type = Person and ID = I4. Note the search button if you need to look up the individual.
Now we are ready to upload the files. Go back to the top of the page and click in “Start upload”. You should see the upload progress bar on each image. When the upload completes, you should see something like this:
Note that I have already typed a description into the box for the first photo. You can do the same for all uploaded images.
Click the ”Save” button as you complete each description. The Media Links button allows you to link the images one-by-one to different individuals. But I selected grandpa’s images this time, so I want to link all of them to him. I go to the page bottom and click on ”Select All”. All the section boxes get selected, and I could de-select them one by one, if so desired. I could also delete the images from this page (the image files are not deleted from your TNG subfolder).
Now that all the images are selected, I check the page bottom to be sure the individual’s ID number is correct, that all the images are selected, then I click on “Link to selected”. Done.
Just to verify it, I’ll go back to the public-view of the individual page for Peter George Benedict, scrolling to the bottom. And there he is. If you hover your cursor over any of the thumbnail images, a pop-up window will show a larger version. Or you can click on the thumbnail to see the image in an individual page.