Gallery settings

What kind of gallery this is

The first choice on the tab, and it quietly sets everything else: what the fields below are called, what the date line under the name means, and what visitors can leave you.

Pick A hero and a second row appears — a person or a pet, living or remembered. That inner choice tunes the tone and decides which awards visitors are offered. A wedding or a journey doesn’t need it, so it isn’t shown.

The name, and the words around it

Four fields build the masthead, and a live preview right beneath them shows the result as you type — you never have to save and go look.

A lead-in is optional words before the name (“Our Wild”, “In memory of”). The name is the star, shown emphasized. A second name turns it into a pair honored together, joined by an ampersand. Then an optional tagline and an italic header quote beneath.

Two controls decide how the masthead ends. The header ornament is the small line-and-diamond mark — put it above the quote, below everything, or choose None. Separately, a rule under the header is the full-width line between the masthead and the page menu; uncheck it for a plainer top. They’re independent, so you can keep the ornament and drop the rule, or the other way round.

There’s also a footer text field for a line at the very bottom of the gallery, and a checkbox that adds a quiet “next page →” link at the foot of each page — worth turning on once your gallery runs to more than one.

Pages as a strip of thumbnails

A second checkbox turns the page links at the top of your gallery into a strip of thumbnails, each page shown by its own featured photo. It suits a gallery whose pages are chapters — readers can see where they’re going instead of only reading it — and like the link above, it needs more than one page. Your Awards and Testimonials pages stay as plain text links beneath it: the strip is for chapters.

Two settings shape the strip, and they work independently. Show the strip as two rows suits a gallery with a lot of chapters: the pages divide evenly between the rows, and once there are more chapters than fit, the strip scrolls sideways rather than growing taller.

With an odd number of pages the lower row ends one photo short, sitting to the left. Centre the rows tucks it under the middle of the row above instead; with an even count both rows match and the setting has nothing to do.

Thumbnails across sets how many photos cover the width before the scrolling starts — really a choice about size: a smaller number means larger thumbnails. Blank fits as many as the screen allows. A narrow phone always fits fewer — the number is a ceiling rather than a promise, because honouring eleven on a phone would leave each photo too small to recognise.

Deep zoom appears here if you have Pro. Turn it on and visitors can zoom right in, to the full detail of every photograph whose original we keep; we make the deep zoom copies in the background after you save. Turning it off removes them again.

The theme

A theme re-skins the whole gallery — its colors, its type, everything. Pick one, look at it, pick another. Nothing about your photographs, captions or writing changes when you switch, so there’s no cost to trying them all.

If you’re making something quiet, Heirloom and Midnight Velvet are the gentlest. All 18 are laid out on the themes page.

The three tiers

The Sharing tab always names your gallery’s current state in plain words, so you know who can find it before you touch anything.

Every gallery starts at “Link only.” That is a real, safe place to stay — anyone you send the link to gets in, and search engines are told not to list it. Being findable in search is something you switch on deliberately, never something that happens to you.

Groups, and the homepage

The same tab holds two narrower ways to share. A group is a small private circle — most often a family — where members share galleries with each other and nobody else. A group only ever lists public galleries, so a password-protected one is never shown there, and the tab says so beside the toggle.

Beneath that toggle sits a keywords field — a few comma-separated words someone might type into Browse, this site’s own search. A place, a year, a group, a breed: whatever this gallery is about. It is always there, so you can write them before you turn In search on; they are only used while the gallery is discoverable, and leaving it blank loses nothing.

They don’t affect Google. What a web search sees is the gallery itself — its name, the lead-in line beneath it, and the words in your captions and stories. Keywords are for finding a gallery once someone is already here.

You can also offer your gallery for the homepage. It’s an open invitation rather than an application: only a small hand-picked selection appears, and it rotates. Setting a viewing password withdraws the offer automatically.

Collaborators

Your gallery has its own invite link, and you choose what an invitation grants before you send it — the role sits beside the invite, not somewhere to be changed afterwards. Helping is free, permanently: there’s no clock on a collaborator and nothing for them to buy.

There are three roles, each doing strictly more than the one before:

• Uploader — can add photographs, and nothing else. Their uploads wait in a held tray until someone who arranges the gallery places them, so a helper with a shoebox of scans can never disturb your sequence.
• Editor — adds, captions and arranges — and can see and add to the details you keep about this gallery’s photographs (who’s in them, when and where; add only, never remove, recorded as theirs), and can download your original files, including where they were taken — but never touches these settings.
• Caretaker — everything an editor can do, plus these settings. Close to being you, so give it deliberately.

You can email the invite directly instead of copying the link, and the panel keeps a record of every invite with its status. Regenerate the link or remove someone at any time.

What visitors can leave

Your gallery can carry up to three extra pages, and you decide whether each exists. Visitors can give a curated award, or leave a written note — called Testimonials on a gallery like yours. There’s also an optional second page for updates, kept apart from the first so two kinds of writing-in don’t mix — useful when a gallery has two audiences. You name these pages: each has its own heading and the line beneath it, and you can hide the heading altogether since the menu already names the page.

Nothing a visitor writes appears until you approve it. It waits first on your gallery’s To review page — linked from the top of these settings, from your gallery’s card, and from the Builder — and you’re emailed when something lands, immediately or as one daily digest. Whether you’re emailed, and how often, is set here.

The updates page can be one you write. Two checkboxes decide what visitors may add there, and you can always post yourself either way — your own posts go up straight away, since there’s nobody to approve them but you. Turn both off and the page becomes a journal only you write, which is what you want for a trip you’re posting from as it happens. Leave replies on with visitor posting off and people can respond underneath what you write without starting topics of their own — the shape that suits an artist posting a work in progress. Replies need an account, which keeps a page quieter than open posting, and they still wait for your approval.

Hide and Delete are not the same refusal, and the difference falls on the person who wrote it. Hide takes a note off your gallery and tells them it’s hidden — and you can approve it later, so it’s a shelf rather than a verdict. Delete removes it for good and tells them nothing, which is what you want for spam and nothing else.

If someone signed in has chosen a display name, the queue shows their account handle beside it — so a friendly name never costs you the ability to tell who wrote something.

This tab is also where you write your own note — a standing few words of yours that sits above everyone else’s, at the top of the page. What it asks you for follows the kind of gallery: a hero’s asks how they came into your life, a body of work asks what you were making. You also choose which awards your gallery offers here, and invent custom awards of your own.

A small tag can sit above your note saying who it is from. What that offers follows the kind of gallery — a hero’s offers the family, a wedding offers the couple, and a gallery with no such voice simply doesn’t offer it. You can always write your own tag instead, or have none.

Anything you’ve already dealt with folds away. On To review, what’s waiting for you stays at the top, open; everything you’ve approved or hidden collects under Already reviewed, closed, with a count per page so you can see at a glance where the activity is. Open it and it’s all still there — you can un-hide something, or take down something live, however long ago it went up.

How the notes are laid out is set here too. Two columns look better with a handful; one column reads better once there are many, because a long list in two columns runs all the way down the first before starting the second, and the dates jump back in time halfway across the page. Left on Automatic it switches for you as the page fills, and you can pin either if you’d rather choose.

The gallery address

At the foot of the first tab, under Advanced, is your gallery’s web address. Changing it no longer breaks the links people already have — the old address keeps working and forwards to the new one, keeping whatever page or photo was on the end of it. The old address is also retired for good, so nobody else can take it.

Still worth pausing over: printed cards and anything already read aloud won’t follow, and the change is immediate for everyone. It’s safe now — just not invisible.

If you keep more than one gallery

These settings always apply to the gallery you last opened. Open two in two tabs and switch between them, and the older tab is showing settings for a gallery you have since moved away from — so saving there would change the wrong one.

It won’t. That tab will tell you which gallery you were editing and which one you are in now, and nothing is saved. Reload it, or reopen the gallery you meant, and make the change there.

Deleting this gallery

The last tab deletes this gallery and its photos. It asks you to type the gallery’s name and enter your password, because it cannot be undone.

Your account survives, along with any other galleries you own. Closing the account itself is a separate thing, on My account — and before you do either, you can download every photograph you’ve uploaded, at full quality, with all of its captions and dates. Save that download to your computer before you delete: deleting removes any download you’ve prepared.