the Basics

The main idea of our site is sharing photos - publishing your own or viewing other users' - and communicating through them. This section describes the ways of searching others' photos and presenting your own. There are also photographers who need not share but find it useful to have their photos backed up - such too can definitely find this service to be of interest, since we provide safe storage and there is no requirement to share what you upload.

the Search

Since digital photos represent visual images, in fact, by numbers, they are not searchable without supplemental information. As a result, we ask all photographers to describe the subject of the photos by adding any combination or all of the available labels: a title, a description and a set of tags.

It is also possible to exclude any album or photograph from the public search results and to prevent its being viewed (see for example "the Unlisted access mode" in "Protection").

Example 1 (searching) To perform a search, simply type the relevant keywords into the search field - located at the top of the page. Press Enter on your keyboard or click the search button.

The text you submit is matched against all titles, tags (keywords) and descriptions of both photos and albums. It is also matched against the "About me" sections of the registered users' profiles and their nicknames. The Search is available to any visitor with or without an account.

The search results are divided into three sections. The uppermost contains the photos whose labels match the search terms (a), the second section contains the relevant albums (b) and when the terms are contained in someone's profile name or description, there is a third section with such profiles (c).

(a) You may click a photograph to view it together with all the information about it that the photo owner decided should be displayed (see "the Tools" in "Personalization"). The photographer's nickname is displayed right above the photograph in the navigation row. You may use this row to get to the photographer's homepage, the category, and the album that contains the photograph.

(b) You may click an album to view all the public photos contained inside. The upper panel (the buttons: "Buy", "Download Album", "Go to Album" and "Slideshow" can be personalized - see "the Functionality" in "Personalization") contains the navigation row and the buttons enabled by the owner of the photographs. You may click any photo to see it in a greater resolution and to see the information assigned to it.

(c) In the case that the third section is visible, you may use it to navigate to the users' homepages.

the Browse

Using the Browse is like using shortcuts to search queries without having to do any typing. Moreover, you may see some photos that are pretty hard to find as their authors may not yet have assigned any labels to them. The following two Browse options are currently available : “Latest” – a list of the latest public uploads “Most Viewed” – a list of all public uploads filtered by the number of hits, the possible filtering modes are : "Last 7 days" , "Last month" and "All time".

the Slideshow

There are two Slideshows available for you to use : the Slideshow and the Slideshow Light. While viewing the contents of an album, there - in the upper right corner of your screen - is a button available that allows you to enjoy the photos in a slide and this can also be displayed in the full-screen mode made to fit any of the monitors you might have at home or at work.

You may access this feature through each of the individual photos or through the album menu. Either way, our Slideshow shows you all of the photos from a certain album. As is valid for the subjects of all of the topics in this section, also the Slideshow is fully available to members and non-members alike.

Another way to view a certain Slideshow is from a direct link (see "Sharing a link to an album").

The Slideshow Light can be either displayed at the top of your homepage or embedded in a web-site of yours.

The Slideshow Light is the very same that can be seen on the BlueMelon's homepage. To get a like of that on your own BlueMelon homepage, it is enough to open an album and choose the "Featured Slideshow" menu entry from the "Tools" menu located at the top of the web-site.

The Slideshow Light's background and border are rendered according to the current theme of your homepage and it is available in two sizes: 800x600 and 400x300 as of the time being and the interval is customizable as well. The Slideshow Light's settings can be changed using a Quick Panel accessible via a familiar "Change look" button which can be seen when you hover the mouse pointer over the Slideshow Light while logged in.

Reading the EXIF

The photo page includes a side panel that contains the various available tools ("Photo details", "Keywords" and "View Exif") containing supplementary information or the Comments panel (see below). The photo owner may choose which tools to display (see "Tools" in "Personalization").

During the upload process, our uploaders are able to extract and make available to you the metadata information such as the shooting conditions, the time the photo was taken, and the equipment used when taking the photo.

This metadata information comes from the EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) section of the file — an industry standard for storing interchange information in image files, especially those using the JPEG compression. Most digital cameras now use the EXIF format, but the actual content depends greatly on the digital camera model used and its manufacturer. Our service makes available most of the meaningful EXIF data via the “View Exif” link in the side panel. With the default settings anyone may see this information.

If you do not see the EXIF info for a photograph, it most likely means that the EXIF metadata were not present in the photo during the upload process. This may have happened for a variety of reasons, with the most likely reason being that the file was editted in some desktop software and saved in a way that did not preserve the file's metadata.

the Comments

It is an outstanding feature as it is the only one that completely loses its sense without visitors. It is the communication interface between your photo and the people that it is presented to. It is something like the feedback form that we have, but this feature can be turned off.

The unregistered users are required to recognize and type a set of symbols in case they want to comment. It is an implementation of the spam protection consisting of CAPTCHA images.

All the comments ever recieved are visible below the commented photo. The owner of the photograph may remove them at any time and for whatever cause, but this action cannot be undone.

You will be notified of new comments on your homepage and you may review all of the comments ever received in the entry in the roll-down "My Stuff" menu labelled "Received Comments".

Example 2 (disabling the comments)   To disable the Comments for all of the user's albums just navigate to the Control Panel while to disable the Comments for a certain album only visit its Settings - a very useful thing when you want your family photos “undisturbed” by others. Example 3 (disabling e-mail notifications) To make it possible for you to read your new comments in the shortest possible time after they have been posted, we have included notification sending to your e-mail address. You may disable this option in the Control Panel "General Settings" tab