Tab Separated Values (TSV) files

Your TSV file should look something like this (where <TAB> is the thing you get by pressing your tab key - most likely sitting to the left of the top row of letters).

Filename<TAB>Short name<TAB>Gallery<TAB>Description<TAB>Licence
banana.jpg<TAB>banana<TAB>fruit<TAB>Our favourite yellow fruit<TAB>cc-pd

If you had any pending uploads, you could download a skeletal TSV file to get you started.

You can just do this in a text editor - but you quite likely have something which will make the job easier. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel or GNU's Gnumeric will let you save the grid as TSV directly - giving you a more reasonable interface to edit in. Remember to save as TSV though - this won't work if you send in an Excel document directly.

Note that no fields can contain tabs themselves. Since a tab will never be much use in any of the fields - this isn't too harsh an imposition.

The top line of the file denotes which columns you are filling in. You can fill in any of the following. You must include either the filename or the numeric ID (see below), as this is the most sensible way to identify the picture until you give us a short name and gallery where the picture will live. You should check that you are spelling these correctly, or the next page will complain (capitalisation and spacing does not matter, but the letters do).^[Note]

ID

The number of the upload on the system. This is useful if you have pending uploads with identical filenames, and is included in the skeletal file, but you shouldn't want to muck about with this by hand.

Filename

The filename of the picture in your pending uploads

New Filename

You can change the filename if you want to provide a more sensible filename than the one it was uploaded with.

Short Name

Limited to simple letters, numbers, the dash and - if you must - underscore (but consider someone trying to find one by looking at the keyboard). If this isn't unique within the gallery then you will be told about it on the results page.

Gallery

This should be the short name of the gallery - that is the bit which appears in the Web address (so for http://gallery.future-i.com/wedding/ you would just put wedding here)

Readable name

The title of the picture

Source

Where the picture came from or who took it

URL for Source

A web address for the given source

Licence

Choose the licence you wish to put the picture under and use the name in brackets on the about licences page - e.g. cc-pd for Public Domain, cc-by for Creative Commons, with Attribution.

Description

The public description of the picture

Comment

Not shown to other users, but useful for your own notes (e.g. which roll of film &c)

Keywords

A list of the keywords you want to tag the picture with, with commas between them. Use 'not-blah' to vote against 'blah' for a picture.

Use the short name of the keyword (the bit that appears in the Web address).

Any keywords you use like this have to already exist in that gallery.

To make the pictures public you will need to fill in at least the Short name, Gallery and Readable name - if you haven't already.

Note:

Althugh we don't care about the order or capitalisation, if you use Excel then it will break if the first column of a TSV is called 'ID'. We found this out the hard way and the skeletal TSV you now get calls that column 'id', which Excel doesn't currently screw up. More from Microsoft. Obviously the way to fix this is to have people not have files formatted like that, rather than make the loader for Excel less brain damaged.