the Basics

The mission of our site is to store and present your photos. You may have your photos stored in a cardboard box in the cellar and this is perfectly sound if you want them to be seen only by yourself. But if there are other people – maybe miles away – who are interested in seeing them, why not to make it worth the time or just make it simpler?

Albums and categories are used for organizing your photographs in a tree-like to an structure similar to that of the files on a hard-drive. Using categories is optional but albums hold your sorted photos and are thus required if you want to set an access mode - including the public one - to a photo. If you do not use categories, it may be hard to comfortably share and maintain large numbers of various photographs.

the Essentials

An album holds the actual photographs. Photos that are not uploaded into any album, are treated as “Unsorted Photos” and as such are not publicly available. An album can have a title, a description and a set of tags (keywords), and access to it can be customized (see “Personalization”).

As a visitor, you can view only the photographs that have the public access, which means that both an album and the photo have public access mode.

the Settings page containing the possible access mode settings

As a photographer, not only can you personalize every Album separately (see “Personalization”) you can also assign your albums to any number of categories which too may be within categories. Thus you may create a hierarchy that provides you and your visitors with a fast and easy to comprehend navigation (see “Album-Category Hierarchy).

A simple tree-like hierarchy may look like this.

Email invitations

To enable others to : view your private albums or photos, your password-protected albums without their knowing the password, or the unlisted albums or photos - you may use the invitations. The invitations override any privacy setting you have applied to your albums or photos when the recipient uses the special link sent with the invitation - in the time the invitation is valid.

Users other than you will not have the option of inviting people to come and watch your photos or albums - the right to do so is solely the owner's, but they may forward your attached link to others thus allowing them to access your photos or albums. Hence be careful when choosing whom to invite.

Example 3-1 (sending an invitation by email) In order to invite your friends via e-mail to come and have a look at your photos (albums), you have to navigate to your chosen photo (album). The feature is accessible via the "Share" button located in the top toolbar and is accessible only to the owner of the photo (the album).

... once you have chosen the "Invite by Email" entry, you are presented with a QuickPanel similar to the one in the screenshot below.

Each BlueMelon user may maintain an address book which is displayed in the left side of the QuickPane. There you may add contacts, remove them or choose some or all of them to be sent an invitation.

By clicking a name (the left-most column in the address book), the thereto assigned address is included in the recipients list and will be among those to receive the current invitation. Should you decide not to include someone after having added them to the list, you may use the "remove" link to exclude them from the list again. You may specify the subject of the e-mail invitation as the recipients will receive it and you may specify a short message to be sent with the invitation.

Example 3-2 (reviewing and canceling an invitation) The invitations are by default valid for the time period of a year since the time that they were sent. However, it may happen that you - for one reason or another - decide that you no longer wish anyone to have access to the album or photo that you have invited them to view : for such cases there is the option of deleting an invitation using

the "My Invitations" page. This page is accessible by choosing the "Sent Emails" entry accessible via the "My Stuff" menu. Here you may delete any invitation using the "remove" link at the right side of every one. After it has been removed, the special link will not give anyone access anywhere.

Via this page, you may also access each invitation's details, including its expiration date, the list of recipients, the message sent with the invitation and the number of times the invitation has actually been used.

the Facebook and the Twitter service support

Facebook and Twitter users may use the BlueMelon interface to post a link to a photo, an album, or an album's SlideShow directly from our site to their Facebook "Wall" or as a “tweet” respectively.

Example 3-3 (sharing your album on facebook) You have to navigate to the album page you want to “advertise“ on your Facebook “wall” and then just choose the "Share on Facebook" entry in the "Share" menu (in the screenshot at the right side it is the album menu when viewing single photo)

... you need to be logged in on Facebook and if you are not, you are presented with the login option. After you have logged in, you may post a link to either a photo, a whole album, or an album's slideshow - this can be chosen in the drop-down menu as can be seen in the screenshot below. You can also type a text that will be posted with the content. ... after you click the "Send" button, a like of this will appear on your Facebook "Wall" - clicking the image opens the BlueMelon's page for the content that you have chosen as mentioned above (in the case of a private album, you will not be presented with the QuickPanel at all and in the case of a password-protected album everyone but you is required to enter the password in order that they may access the album's contents)

Sharing a link to a photograph

There are two types of links that each photo has:

1. The browser link
Each photograph on our site has its own Internet Resource Locator (URL), just as the page you're now reading has one. If you give a friend the URL - the one in the browser - for your photo, he'll know where to go to see your memories and can navigate through our navigation row wherever the access mode allows it. In the case that you send your friend the URL to a protected photo, he shall be denied access and the page will generate an error. Of course, you may put the link on your website or elsewhere, if it is allowed by the owners of that site.

2. A direct link
Click the "Share" button located either in the side panel or in the top toolbar when viewing a photo. You'll see a list of sizes (see below) available for the photo together with a link for each of them. Such direct link allows the recipient to see only that certain photograph in that certain size without any additional information or the navigation row. Thus he is unable to view the whole album in case that he has only the direct link and nothing else.

As is valid for the browser link too, even a direct link will not make it possible for the viewer to access private or password-protected photos. However, a direct link to an album (or a photo) is the only way to make it possible for someone to see your unlisted albums (or photos).

Sharing a link to an album

There are two ways of sharing an album: you may provide someone with a link to your album and you may offer them a slideshow. There are two Slideshows available, one of them can be directly linked to and displayed from the browser in the full-screen mode and the other can be embedded in a website. To get both: the links and the HTML codes, all that you need to do is click on the "Share" button which is accessible when viewing an album. A Quick Panel will be displayed from which you may then copy the link you prefer.

the Display quality

Keep in mind that you and your visitors automatically see the largest size image that fits your screen based on the resolution and browser window size. Making the browser window small will result in a small image. Maximizing the window on a high resolution monitor will load the largest image possible. As for the above-mentioned direct links, the table below shows all the possible formats you may get a link to. It also means that there are six copies of every photo that you upload stored on our servers.

The formats for various icons, avatars or their like: 75x75, 100x100, 150x150,
The formats for fast screening or documents: 400x300, 800x600
And the link to the original-sized photo.

Moreover, there are two more links: one leads the recipient to the whole of your album as such and the other one to your album presented in the slideshow (see "Slideshow").

When you view the original photo in BlueMelon full-screen slideshow, it is automatically resized according to the monitor used ; this means that a quite nice big photo of the resolution for example 4800x3600 is actually visible as one with the dimensions of 1024x768 on a 18” monitor or 1280x1024 on a 19” monitor or 1600x1200 on 21” or even 2560x2048 rendered for a 25” display (the actual resolution, however, depends on the monitor used - the above-mentioned sizes are for orientation only).

the Full album downloader

You may find the “Download” button right at the top of every album that has this option enabled (see "Enabling the Full album downloader")

After clicking the “Download” button you are asked to choose a destination directory for your photos. You may also choose one of the three naming modes: “Original file name”, “File title” or “Numbering starting at 00001”.

Furthermore, our downloader is able to resume previous downloading, were it to have been cancelled or should it fail to finish the process for whatever other reason, by recognizing the already downloaded photos in the destination directory.