Using the Builder

Uploading

Drag photos onto the drop zone, or click it to browse. JPG, PNG and HEIC (iPhone photos) all work, and a large batch uploads in small groups behind the scenes — so you can select a lot at once and leave it to get on with it.

Your account has a set amount of photo space, shared across every gallery you own. The upload page always shows how much you’ve used, and you can add more when you need it.

Uploading the same photo twice is harmless. Duplicates are detected and skipped.

Photos someone else sent

If you’ve invited someone as an Uploader, their photographs don’t join your gallery on their own. They wait in a tray at the top of the Builder, headed “2 photos waiting to be placed”. Nothing in it is on your gallery yet and no visitor can see any of it — a helper with a shoebox of scans can never disturb a sequence you arranged.

Pick a page and click Place, and the photo joins the end of that page, where you can then arrange it like any other. It goes to the end deliberately: it is joining an arrangement you made, so it defers to it rather than landing at the top.

Discard deletes that photo for good, and Discard all empties the tray. Waiting photos do count against your photo space — discarding frees it again.

Placing and discarding are for you and your Editors and Caretakers; an Uploader can’t wave their own contribution through. The roles are explained in the Gallery settings guide.

Adding videos

Paste a YouTube or Vimeo link into the “Add a video — YouTube or Vimeo” box near the top of the Builder. It joins the grid alongside your photos with a small play badge, and opens as a full embedded player when clicked — no file to upload, no thumbnail to make. If a Vimeo thumbnail can’t be fetched, a quiet placeholder in your gallery’s own colours stands in.

The featured photo

The photo in the top-left corner of each page is your featured photo — the one that leads the page, and the one its page shows in the page list at the top. It is two squares by two unless you give it another size with ↔, like any other photo. Hover any photo (on a phone or tablet, tap it) and press the ★ star to make it the featured one instead.

Once you’ve chosen one, new uploads join the gallery without ever bumping it out of that spot. It changes only when you say so — either by starring another photo on that page, or by sending this one away to a different page, in which case whatever follows it becomes the page’s lead.

Every control is on the photo

Hover any photo in the grid and a small panel appears in its top-right corner. On a phone or tablet, tap the photo instead: the tap ticks it, and a ticked photo shows its panel (a heading or a story, which can’t be ticked, shows its own when tapped). From the keyboard, Tab to a photo and its panel opens; Tab again walks into it, and Enter ticks the photo. The panel lets you feature it, take it out of the gallery, nudge it up or down its page, rotate it, caption it, set how wide it runs, or open its details. Sending it to a different page is a selecting job, not a panel button — click the photo and use the bar (see Arranging above).

The pencil ✎ opens the caption editor, where you can also choose whether to show the photo’s date. Saving marks the button Saved ✓ and closes the editor — worth watching for, because an ordinary tile doesn’t display its caption, so nothing else on the screen changes. The rotate arrows fix a sideways photo, and ✕ takes it out of the gallery — asking first, and offering to keep it in My Photos rather than destroy it (see below).

The caption editor and the details also lend each other a hand, always at your say-so. If the photograph’s details hold a description and the caption is empty, the editor offers it — Use its description… — and one press copies it in; nothing from your private details ever reaches a public page without that press. The other way round, if there’s no description yet, a tick box — Also save to the photograph’s details — keeps the caption with the photograph itself, so it follows it into other galleries; it never overwrites a description already written.

The ⓘ opens the photograph’s details — the same record you edit on My Photos: what’s happening, who’s in it, when and where it was taken. A caption belongs to this gallery; details belong to the photograph itself and follow it into every gallery that holds it. Details are shown only to you and the people you’ve invited as editors or caretakers of a gallery holding the photograph — nothing written there appears on a public page unless you explicitly put it in a caption, except the date in When, which dates the caption when the photograph leads a page. As you type names and places, the same suggestions you’d see on My Photos appear here too — pick one to keep a single spelling, so “Dad’s photographs” stays one search rather than three. To describe many photographs at once, tick them on My Photos, which offers batch details. You’ll see the ⓘ on galleries you own — and on galleries you help with as an editor or caretaker, where it opens the owner’s record in a narrower form: fill what’s empty and add names or keywords, never change or remove, with your additions recorded as yours. A video’s ⓘ holds a shorter set — title, what’s happening, when it was, who’s in it and the occasion — because there’s no photograph file for the rest to describe. A few very old uploads can’t hold details at all, so they don’t show it.

Every details panel opens with that photograph’s ID — a short code such as 3f9a1c2b4d5e, with the gallery and the file it came from beside it, and a Copy button. It is the fastest way to tell us which photograph when something looks wrong: “the one in the corner” needs a screenshot and a guess, and the code needs neither. The same code works as an address — paste it after /photos?edit= and that photograph’s details open on My Photos.

The ✕ asks before it does anything, and it offers two different things. Remove from this gallery takes the photograph out of this gallery and puts it back in My Photos, where it waits until you want it again — nothing is lost, and you can add it to this or any other gallery later. Delete permanently is the other one, set apart at the bottom and asked twice, because it destroys the stored file.

The card tells you which situation you are in before you choose. If the photograph is also in another gallery, or already sitting in My Photos, it says so and names them — deleting then only removes this gallery’s copy. If this is the only copy, it says that too, and deleting really is final: we cannot get it back. Deleting also removes any download the gallery’s owner has prepared on My account, because it could still hold the photograph; if that is you, the Builder says so, and you can prepare a new one there. If you are tidying a gallery, Remove is almost always the one you want.

If the photograph lives in other galleries too, the card points you at My Photos, which is the one place that can take it out of every gallery at once. That lives there rather than here on purpose: this card is available to the editors you invite to a gallery, and clearing a photograph out of an account’s whole collection is the account holder’s to do. You will see the pointer on your own galleries; someone helping you will not.

Clearing out several at once. Select the photos you want gone — click them, or click the first and Shift‑click the last — and the bar at the bottom offers Remove. It opens the same card, with the same two choices, for the whole set: how many go back to My Photos, how many are already safe in another gallery, and how many are the only copy there is. Nothing happens until you press one of them, and the permanent one still asks a second time.

The featured photo moves like any other. Its panel — ✕ remove, ✎ caption, ↺ ↻ rotate, ⓘ details, ⇢ page… on multi-page galleries, and its size — has arrows that make the moves that fit a photograph that leads: ↑ steps it out beside the page’s new featured photo, ↓ sends it to the bottom of its page, and with more pages ⇈ places it beside page 1’s featured photo while ⇊ sends it to the very end of the gallery. The moment it moves, whatever photograph follows takes the featured slot — and to hand the slot to a particular photo, just star that one. There’s still no star on the featured tile itself (it’s already the featured one), and any arrow that would do nothing on your gallery simply isn’t drawn. And it drags like any other tile — drop it where you want it relative to its neighbours, and the featured slot passes to whoever now sits first.

A photograph that runs wide

Most photographs sit in a square tile, four to a row. A panorama doesn’t belong in a square — so the width control ↔ lets one run across the grid instead: three columns, centred, or the full width of the page.

Nothing is cropped. The photograph keeps its own shape and the band is as deep as it needs to be, so a long sweep is a thin ribbon and a gentler panorama is a taller band. That is why there are only two settings and no height to fiddle with — the photograph decides the height, you only choose how far it reaches.

Which one to pick is really a question about the photograph. A wide sweep — the kind you make by panning a phone across a view — wants the full width. A gentler one that’s merely wider than it is tall usually sits better at three columns, where it doesn’t dominate the page. Try one, look, and change it: nothing is lost either way.

A wide photograph always takes a row of its own, and the photographs around it close up to fill the rows above and below. If you set it on the first photograph of a page it becomes a banner across the top and stays the page’s featured photo; its caption, heart and corners stay on the photograph beneath it, which keeps its large size.

On a phone, visitors see the gallery two to a row, with the featured photograph (at its usual size) across the full width, and a three-column panorama runs the full width too. The Builder stays four to a row, so what you arrange here is what a desktop shows.

Cropping a tile

Tick one photograph and press Crop… in the bar. The card shows the photograph in a frame the shape of its tile — a square for most, wide for a 2×1, tall for a 1×2 — and you drag it and zoom to choose what the tile shows. Only this gallery’s tile changes: the lightbox and downloads keep the whole photograph. A photograph running across the page as a band is never cropped, so its card offers no frame.

A print with a shaped edge. A scanned print with rounded corners, a scalloped edge or an oval can be cut out along that edge, so the page shows round it rather than the scanner’s lid. Press Look for a shaped edge: the card says what it found and shows the print as it would stand on the page. Choose Cut out along its edge. If a pale rim or the lid’s shadow still shows, Tighter moves the edge in a step at a time, with a new preview each time, and Looser moves it back. A print you cut out earlier can be tightened the same way, or put back with As scanned; the scan itself is always kept.

One Keep saves the card. Nothing changes while you choose. Keep saves everything you chose on the card — the edge, the crop, and whether the photograph is shown whole in its tile — and the line just above it says what that will be. Cancel leaves the tile as it was.

Arranging

Drag any tile to reorder it. If dragging is fiddly — on a phone, or across a long page — use the arrows in the corner panel instead: ↑ ↓ move a photo one place, ⇈ ⇊ send it to the very top or bottom of the gallery.

To move a photo to a different page, select it and use Move to… in the bar that appears — the same control whether you are moving one or twenty. Headers and stories keep a ⇢ page… of their own, because those aren’t photos and don’t take a tick.

Moving several at once. Click a photo to select it, and keep clicking to add more — a bar appears at the bottom of the screen counting them, with a Move to… list to send the whole set to another page. Pages are listed by their own titles where you have given them one, so you are picking “The early years” rather than counting which number it is. To take a whole run at once, click the first and then hold Shift and click the last: everything between them comes with it. Shift‑clicking a photo that is already selected clears that run again, so a set that goes too far is undone the same way it was made. Clear empties the selection and the bar goes with it; nothing moves until you choose a page. The same bar carries Remove, for a set you want out of the gallery altogether — see Every control is on the photo below.

Clicking a photo used to open it large, and that is now the Lightbox button in the corner of each one. In the lightbox, where the photograph holds more detail than your screen is showing, Zoom in sits on its lower‑left corner: press it and drag to move around, and a click puts the whole photograph back. With Deep zoom on in Gallery settings (Pro), Zoom in on a photograph whose original we keep goes all the way, full screen, as deep as the original goes. A click on the photograph as it first opens still closes the lightbox, as it always has; your visitors have the same. Selecting is an Edit‑mode gesture; dragging still works, and a drag you give up on doesn’t leave the photo selected. Dragging one of a selected group moves the whole group, which is the quick way to shift a few photos a short distance — use Place when the destination is further off or on another page. A featured photo ticks like any other — it is simply the first photo on its page, so moving it away just promotes the next one, and a run that includes it comes with it.

Moving a whole page. Click the page marker itself and the entire page is selected — the marker and every photo under it, lit up so you can see exactly what will travel. Then Place, scroll to where the page belongs, and Place again: the header, its title and all its photos land together. One page at a time, and headers and stories still move with their own arrows.

Clearing a page out. With a page selected, Remove takes its photographs out of the gallery — back to My Photos, as always. The page marker stays, and so does anything written on the page: a header or a story is not a photograph, and one word should not mean two things. The card says exactly that before you press.

Beside it sits Remove the whole page, for when you mean the page as well. That takes the photographs out and deletes the marker, so the page is gone: the pages after it renumber, and any links you have shared to them will point somewhere else. Anything written on the page isn’t deleted — it joins the page above, which is what removing a page marker has always done. Page 1 doesn’t offer this, because it has no page above to merge into.

Delete permanently on a selected page works the same way: it destroys the page’s photographs and deletes the marker, because getting rid of every photograph on a page is getting rid of the page. The card says so, and so does the second ask. Writing on the page still joins the page above, and on Page 1 the marker stays.

Or place them exactly where you want — by scrolling. With photos selected, click Place in the same bar. A coloured bar appears down the left of the page and follows you as you scroll: wherever it rests is where your photos will land. Scroll to the spot, click Place, and the whole set drops in together. Cancel backs out and changes nothing.

This is the quick way to deal with a batch you’ve just uploaded, which arrives at the top of page 1, just after its featured photo — select them, scroll to where they belong, place. It gets you to the right neighbourhood in one go; nudge with the arrows afterwards if you want an exact order. Two things worth knowing: the marker settles on the start of a row rather than mid‑row, and it can’t be used to change which photo is featured — drop a set at the very top of a page and it lands just under the featured one. Use the ★ star for that.

The waiting tray works the same way. Click contributed photos there and the same bar offers Place on… and Discard for the whole set. The two kinds can’t be mixed in one selection — a waiting photo isn’t on a page yet, and a placed one can’t be discarded from the tray — so ticking across the line starts a fresh selection rather than quietly combining them.

Photographs that belong together: a stack. Tick 2 to 10 photos and press Stack in the same bar. The one highest on the page stays in front and the others go behind it, so the page shows a single tile with the edge of a print showing behind it and a small count in the corner. Visitors lose nothing: the lightbox arrows walk through every photograph in the stack, and a strip at the top says where they are (“Stack · 2 of 3”). Click the count on the tile to Bring to front a different one, Take out one (it goes back into the grid just after the stack, and nothing is deleted), or Unstack all. Removing the photograph in front brings the next one forward, and the rest stay stacked. A stack belongs to this gallery only: the same photographs can sit side by side in another.

The back of a print: its verso. If you scanned the back of a photograph because someone wrote on it or a studio stamped it, tick the two scans and press Pair…. The card asks which one is the picture, and nothing is paired until you choose. The back then leaves the grid, the print wears the word verso, and in the lightbox visitors press Turn over to see the back and read its caption. Click verso on the tile to see it turned over, to Caption the back… with what is written on it, to Swap sides if you chose the wrong one, or to say it is Not its verso. The back goes wherever the print goes. Pairing adds it to any of your other galleries that show the print, and so does adding the print to another gallery later. Removing or deleting the print takes its back with it, and the card tells you so before you press. A back does not count against your photographs. The gallery’s owner and its caretakers can pair a verso; editors can stack but not pair, because a pairing changes the photograph in every gallery of the owner’s that shows it.

The grid crops each photograph to its tile. A tall photo or a wide one is cropped to a square tile here so the arrangement stays even and easy to read — or to the size you have given it with ↔, such as two squares across, which suits a wide photograph better. A photograph run across the grid as a band keeps its true shape (see A photograph that runs wide above), and one with transparent edges is shown whole in its tile. Either way, only the preview is cropped. The Lightbox button in the corner of a photo shows the whole frame, portrait or landscape, exactly as you uploaded it. Nothing is ever cut off your actual photograph.

The + Header, + Story and + Page break buttons add the three things that turn a pile of photographs into something paced. None of them count against your photo limit. Here’s what each one looks like on the finished gallery:

Header

A short section label — like “The early years” — marking a new chapter. The editor offers quick-picks including “Latest uploads” and “All photos”, the two labels every gallery starts with, so you can put them back if you ever remove them.

A Divider toggle keeps or drops the hairline that runs on from the end of the label to the right edge of the column. Drop it when the header is doing something other than marking a section — pointing readers to the next page, say.

A second toggle decides whether the header holds its section together. “Stop here” keeps that section’s photos to itself, which can leave the row above it short. “May flow past” lets a photo from the next section fill that gap, so rows stay even. Pick “Stop here” when the header is a real classification — The Navy, say — because a photo borrowed under the wrong heading isn’t untidy, it’s wrong. Headers set to flow show a small flows pill in the Builder so you can tell at a glance.

Story

A passage of text — up to 10,000 characters — with an optional title and a choice of width, for telling part of your hero’s story in words. A story can carry a byline too, when the writing is in the first person and a reader might wonder whose voice it is.

Title style sets how the story’s heading looks: Aa All-caps reads as a quiet label, like a section marker; Aa Italic sets it in the theme’s display face, which suits a titled passage that is meant to be read as a piece of writing rather than a signpost.

Web addresses become links. There’s no button for this — just type the address (https://… or www.…) into a story or a page intro, and it becomes a working link on the finished gallery, opening in a new tab. The link always reads as the address itself; you can’t hide it behind different words. In the Builder’s Edit view it looks like a link but won’t open — a tile is something you click to select and drag to move, so a live link there would carry you off mid-arrangement. Switch to View to try it. Captions and titles stay plain text.

Page break

Splits everything after it onto a brand-new page, with its own featured photo and an optional title. A page title can carry an intro beneath it — a lead-in for the page, set narrow and centered, wider and centered, or full width.

A page nav appears under your gallery header, and again above the footer, so a reader deep in a long page never has to scroll back up to move on.

If your pages are chapters, you can turn that top row into a strip of thumbnails — each page shown by its own featured photo, so readers can see where they’re going rather than only read it. It’s a switch in Gallery settings → Your hero, and it needs more than one page.

Moving a whole page

Hover or tap a page’s marker — the Page 2 — The Early Years bar in the Builder — and its arrows move the entire page: its title, its intro and every photograph on it, all together. ↑ ↓ swap it with the page before or after, ⇈ ⇊ send it straight to the front or to the very end. You can drag the marker onto another page instead, which means “put my page before that one”. An arrow that has nowhere to go simply isn’t drawn, so page 1 carries no upward arrows and the last page carries no downward ones.

Page 1 moves like any other page. Send another page to the front and it becomes page 1; the page that was there simply becomes page 2, keeping its title, its intro and every photograph on it. Page 1 has its own marker at the top of the Builder, the same as every other page — the one thing you can’t do is delete that marker, because there is no page above for its photographs to merge into. Clear its title instead if you don’t want one.

A page’s title can name the page without heading it. Normally the title does two jobs: it labels the page in the row of page links, and it sits as a heading above that page’s photographs. On a gallery with one page of photographs and a Responses or Awards page beside it, those two land a couple of centimetres apart and read as the same words twice. Untick Show this title on the page in the page’s editor and the heading goes while the page keeps its name in the links — the marker in the Builder then says · title hidden so you can see it is switched off. An intro underneath is unaffected; it belongs to the page, not to the heading.

To change where a page starts, move photographs, not the page. This is the one that catches people out: dragging a page’s marker further down its own page looks like it should pull the boundary along, but a page moves as a block, so there’s nothing there to move — the Builder will say so rather than sitting silent. What you want is to send the photographs at the top of the page back to the page before — drag them across the boundary, or select them and use Move to… in the bar. The boundary follows the photographs.

Deleting a page break with ✕ removes only the break. The photographs stay exactly where they are and merge into the page above.

Getting around a long gallery

When a gallery has more than one page, the Builder lists its pages beside your photographs — each page’s featured photo, its number and its title — and the list stays in view as you scroll. Click a page to jump straight to it; the page you’re working in is marked as you go. In View, the same list shows that page in the preview. On a narrower window it sits as a slim row above the photographs instead.

Choosing where it lands

While the popup is open, scroll the gallery behind it — a coloured bar appears down the left edge of one row, marking where your new header, story or page break will drop in. Scroll until it’s beside the row you want, then save.

A new page is the one that chooses for itself. Leave the popup where it is and the new page is added at the end of the gallery, ready to fill — it never lands in front of page 1 just because the button sits at the top. Scrolling behind the popup places it like anything else. A header or story simply drops in at the bar, which starts wherever you were looking.

The bar only ever settles on the start of a row, never mid-row, so a full-width header can never land halfway through a line of photos.

Writing something long

A full life story or a eulogy usually reads best on its own page rather than squeezed between photographs. Add a Page break where you want it to begin, give that page a title, and let a Story fill it — the page becomes a quiet place to read, and your photo pages stay uncluttered.

Guiding readers between pages. If your gallery has more than one page, you can switch on a quiet “next page →” link at the foot of each one (in Gallery settings → Your hero). It names the next page and carries readers on through the story — tidier than adding a header to say “keep going”.

Edit and View

The Edit / View toggle at the top right of the Builder previews your gallery exactly as visitors will see it, without ever leaving the page. Click View to check your work, Edit to keep arranging.

Hearts on your photographs

Visitors with an account can heart a photograph — an outline ♡ invites it, a filled ♥ means they have. The count sits with the featured photo and in the lightbox, and it is deliberately quiet: nothing is ranked by it, nothing is reordered by it, and it never appears on a gallery as a score.

You don’t moderate hearts and there is nothing to switch on. They are simply a way for someone to say this one without writing a note.

If you keep more than one gallery

The Builder always works on the gallery you last opened. So if you have two open in two tabs and switch between them, the older tab is showing a gallery you have since moved away from — and a button there would act on the wrong one.

It won’t. That tab will tell you which gallery you were editing and which one you are in now, then reload itself so it matches. Nothing is saved and nothing is deleted when that happens. If you see it, you have lost nothing except the click — reopen the gallery you meant and do it there.

What’s next

Once your photos are in place, Gallery settings is where you set your gallery’s name and tagline, pick a theme, invite collaborators, set a viewing password and more — one click from the Builder at any time.

There’s a walkthrough for it too: the Gallery settings guide →