Organize Images

The most fundamental concept in ReaGallery is, yes, a gallery itself. Galleries do contain images and are grouped within sites.

Sites

Start organizing your images by creating a new site. Select "New site" from the "Site" menu. Note that most menu actions are also accessible both via toolbar buttons and via right-click context popup menu.

Next thing you should do is set up the initial properties of a new site. The only required property is the site name.

Another fundamental concept in ReaGallery is the template property. The template you choose defines the look and feel of your resulting web-site. After you choose a template you can tweak it using "Template settings" dialog.

As you can see, there are other parameters. These parameters are completely optional but they can greatly enhance your images collection management. First, you can set an author for the site (presumably you). Second, there is some space to give a long description for your site. Finally, you can choose default image size for you site. That's it, all images you add to the galleries within this site will be automatically resized to the dimensions you choose.

Galleries

Next step in organizing your images collection is to create a gallery within a site. To do so, select your site in the Sites and Galleries Tree by left-clicking on it and then select "New gallery" from the "Gallery" menu. As usual, this action is mirrored both as a toolbar button and as a right-click popup menu item.

The properties dialog for a gallery is very similar to that of a site. Again, the only required property is the gallery name.

Other things you can do with your sites and galleries include editing and deleting. All these actions are accessed through the appropriate menus. You can create as many galleries and sites as you need and tweak them freely as much as you like. And of course you can (and should) add images to your galleries. This topic is discussed next.

Images

There are two convenient ways to organize your images into galleries. To use either of them you should first select your gallery in the Sites-and-Galleries Tree by left-clicking on it. Then you have two options. You can either drag-and-drop image files from Windows Explorer into ReaGallery, or you can click "Add Images" in the "Image" menu and use familiar standard Windows File Dialog to select your image files. With either method you do not have to add images one-by-one, you can easily select multiple images at once.

Remember that ReaGallery does not alter your original image files in any way. The "changes" you make to your images with ReaGallery are not applied until publishing stage and even then these changes are made to copies of your images. No matter what you do in ReaGallery, your images are your images and they will stay this way.

Images contained in the current gallery are displayed in Images Grid to the right. You can set up the order of images simply by dragging them within the grid. If you want your images to be sorted just click on the header of the column you want to sort with. Click on the same column again to reverse the sort order. You can move images to another gallery by dragging them over the Sites-and-Galleries Tree. If you want to copy images to another gallery then do the same drag-and-drop operation while holding either "Ctrl" or "Shift" on your keyboard.

Image properties (such as name, author, description, etc.) can be edited using "Edit Image Info" command in the "Image" menu. Image name is required and all other properties are optional.

There is one more thing you can do with your images: image processing. The whole set of image processing activities are accessed via "Image processing" command. ReaGallery currently supports most basic image editing features such as resize, crop, rotate, mirror, brightness and contrast adjustment, border, watermark, red eye correction and a dozen of various artistic effects. If you do not need any of those by now, then you can simply walk through you gallery using "Previous/Next" buttons and get a full-sized preview of your images.