Photos and slide-shows

The language of real estate is photography -- but so is the language of roofing or landscaping or flooring or home-repair or all sorts of other businesses related to home-ownership. engenu is designed to make it easy for you to communicate intelligibly in web sites composed of slide-shows.

We've talked a little bit about inheritance, but, if you think about it, inheritance is at the heart of everything engenu does. When You enter a folder for the first time, engenu is taking an inventory of the contents of that folder and deciding what to do about what it finds.

Subfolders are inherited into sidebar links, a topic we will revisit.

PDF files are inherited as sidebar links, also.

But images are inherited into the slide-show for that particular web page.

What's an image? It's a file that can be displayed in a web browser -- specifically a JPEG file, a PNG file, a GIF file or a BMP file. These will normally be photographs, but they could also be scans of line art or drawings or computer screen captures.

What's the ideal image size? 640 x 480 pixels. You can use any size smaller than that, but the screen might seem to jerk around during the slide-show. Unless you have purchased a customized engenu "skin" that allows for wider images, you should never use an image wider than 640 pixels. The ideal slide-show will result from using images all the same size, all in the same orientation.

So what happens?

When you open an engenu folder for the first time, engenu catalogs the photos in alphabetical order, loading them into the photo editor.

Note that since photos come into engenu in alphabetical order, you can force them to appear in a desired sequence just by naming them in that sequence.

On the way in, photos are given a four-digit sequence number. You can force the photos into a different sequence just by changing those numbers.

How do you resequence images? Like this:



If you want to give the photo a caption, just type it in. Captions are stored in the alt tags for the photo, so they will enhance that page's SEO.

On the other hand, if you want the photo not to be displayed in the slide-show, check the "Omit this photo" box.

When you Save the page, your changes are saved -- all subject to future editing.

Another naming idea: Name your photos with the captions you would like for them to have, such as Thrilling_water_park-style_slide.jpg and The_heated_spa_is_open_year-round.jpg. Then, if you check the "Auto-fill empty captions with the name of the photo" box, those image names will be inherited as photo captions, with the underbars converted to spaces, the next time you Save your work.

How does the slide-show work?

If there is only one image in the folder, or if you have omitted all but one image, that one image will appear as a still. If there is more than one image, engenu will build a Javascript slide-show from the images. But it will also encode the images in a noscript section of the web page. That way, if a particular user has Javascript disabled, the photos will appear as a scrolling stack of images.

What if you add or remove photos?

You can guess, can't you? If you add photos to a previously-edited engenu page, engenu will inherit them the next time you Save your work, adding them all at the end of the slide-show, with the sequence number 9999. You can edit the sequence numbers to place the photos where you want them in the slide-show.

There really is no reason to remove a photo, since you can just omit it. But, if you do remove an image, engenu will dispose of its record of that image the next time you Save your work.

Note that engenu is monitoring the folder for images having been added or removed. At the index level, a previously-edited folder will show a red light, instead of a green light, if images have been added or removed. Inside the editor, you will see a warning in red text if photos have been added or removed.

What if you want photos but no slide show?

Even if you're building your page entirely in HTML in the body section of the editor, the folder you're working in is still the ideal place to store your images. Here's what you can do: Omit all the images in the photo editor, then call them all out exactly where you want them with img tags in your HTML code.

The resequencing illustration shown above is done this way: It's stored within this page's folder, then omitted from the slide show and called out manually with an img tag within the body copy.

Too much jargon for you? That's why engenu makes slide-shows automatically. If you know HTML or PHP, you can do anything you want. If not, you can just inherit your images into the slide-show and then press on to the next page.

Here's a slide show of that refreshing pool as an example: