The Builder is where you upload, arrange, and curate your gallery. Everything on this page happens on one screen — the one you land on after clicking Builder from your Dashboard. Here’s the whole of it, in order.
Every gallery is made of the same pieces — a masthead, a featured photograph, and whatever you arrange beneath it. What changes is the theme you pick and how you use them. A quiet memorial, two heroes honored together, a bright celebration: same builder, same five minutes.
In loving memory
Our Wild Maggie
2009 – 2024
fifteen years of muddy paws
Heirlooma memorial
Boden & Fred
inseparable since the day they met
Old World Hollywooda pair, honored together
The Unstoppable Nora
nine years old and afraid of nothing
Harbora celebration
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.
Drop photos here
or click to browse
the drop zone
Paste a YouTube link into the “Add a YouTube video” 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.
a video, marked with ▶
The large photo at the top of each page is your featured photo — the one that leads the page. Hover any photo and click 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 stays put until you choose a different one.
Maggie on the porch, 2019
the featured photo
Hover a photo and a small panel appears in its top-right corner. Everything you can do to that photo is in there — feature it, delete it, move it, rotate it, caption it, or send it to another page.
The pencil ✎ opens the caption editor, where you can also choose whether to show the photo’s date. The rotate arrows fix a sideways photo, and ✕ removes it from the gallery for good.
the controls, on hover
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 page.
To move a photo to a different page, use ⇢ page… at the foot of the same panel and pick the page and the end you want it at.
Moving several at once. Click Select near the top of the Builder, then click the photos you want — a bar appears at the bottom of the screen counting them, with a Move to… list to send the whole set to another page. Cancel leaves everything where it was. Selecting is an Edit-mode gesture, so dragging pauses while it’s on; turn it off and dragging comes back.
The grid shows square previews. A tall photo or a wide one is cropped to a square tile here so the arrangement stays even and easy to read — but only the preview is cropped. Click any photo and the lightbox shows the whole frame, portrait or landscape, exactly as you uploaded it. Nothing is ever cut off your actual photograph.
square previews; lightbox shows it whole
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:
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.
The early years
the divider runs to the edge
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.
How she found us
She turned up in the hedge at the end of the lane in the wet spring of 2009, thin as a rail and entirely certain she lived here.
a story, with a byline
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.
Page 2 — The Early Years
a new page, with its own lead photo
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.
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.
the bar marks where it lands
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”.
The Edit / View toggle near the top 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.
preview in place
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.
an invitation, and three hearts
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 →
Gallery settings, one click away
Still stuck on something?
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