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New to Beta: A Brand New Image Gallery

We here at Typepad love taking pictures and showing them off to friends and family, so we know that you must love it too!

To make showing your images off a better experience, we've completely updated the Image Gallery, a feature currently available to our Beta Team. This will allow you to put your best foot forward and make a great impression with your blog's photos.

Gallery_example
An example Image Gallery.

To get started, you'll notice the following pop-up when you insert an image, select Edit, and then the Image Gallery option on the Compose Page:

Image_insert
The new Image Gallery image insert.

The first thing you want to do is choose your Thumbnail Size.  This will be the size of the image that is displayed on your blog.

Images added to your Image Gallery will be placed in a grid format (unless you check the Scroll Gallery box, but more on that in a minute), so you'll want to choose your Gallery Width.  This is how wide the Image Gallery will be when displayed on your blog.

Typepad will automatically offer only the number of image options that will fit on your blog's design, so no need to worry about images fitting the gallery.  For example, if you choose the 75 pixel thumbnail size, you'll be able to fit more images in a row than if you choose the 250 pixel thumbnail size, so there will be more choices for 75 pixels than 250 pixels.

You can check the first box to add a border around your Image Gallery.  If this remains unchecked, no border will be added.

Next, you can choose if you'd rather have one line of images for your Image Gallery instead of the grid format.  Checking Scroll Gallery will result in an Image Gallery that looks like this:

Scroll_gallery
An example of a scrolling Image Gallery.

Your readers can then use the scroll bar to see more images in your Image Gallery.

We know that there are times you'll want to edit an Image Gallery to make changes like adding more images, deleting an image, or other adjustments.

To do this, simply click your cursor on an image in the Image Gallery and then click the Insert Image button again. When you do, you'll see the Image Gallery pop-up from earlier, containing the options you've chosen previously. You can pick different ones and save your changes. You can also insert additional new images at this time.

You'll notice one other new option when clicking on an image and clicking the Insert Image button.  When you do this, you can now add a title and an alt-image description for the image. The title will be displayed under the pop-up version of your image when your readers click on the thumbnail on your blog.  The alt image description will only be seen if the images do not load.

Insert_edit
The new image options when editing your Image Gallery.

Double clicking the image will open up the familiar Aviary image editor to make changes to the image's rotation, filter, and more.

Another way you can edit your Image Gallery is by dragging and dropping the images into a new order within the Image Gallery itself.

To do this, click once on the image you want to move within the gallery. You'll see a grey bar appear underneath the image once it's been selected and clicked on. Use this bar to grab the image and move it to its new location.

Grey_bar
The grey bar indicates the image has been selected.

When your readers click an image to view within your Image Gallery, this is what they'll see:

Image_popup.com_footer_.com_foote
An example of an Image Gallery pop-up.

To move to the next or previous image, readers can click the arrow to the sides of the image or the left and right arrow keys on their keyboard. When they reach the final image, they'll be taken back to the first one.

If you'd like to display different colors for the arrow background and/or arrow itself, our Pro Unlimited subscribers can use the Custom CSS feature to do so.  Our Knowledge Base article has example code you can edit and use on your own blog. You can upgrade your plan at any time to begin using Custom CSS.

For more information on the Image Gallery itself, please read our Knowledge Base article.

And there you have it! We love our image gallery makeover and we're sure you will too! Since this is a Beta Team feature, if you want to see it right now, you'll need to join our Beta Team. That will give you immediate access to this and other Beta Team features.

For our non-Beta users, we'll be releasing it soon, but we urge you to give Beta a try in the meantime.

What do you think of its changes?  Are there any features you'd wish we had included or done differently? We also want to see your Image Galleries, so please leave links in the comments so that both us and your fellow Typepad community can take a look!

Have any questions, want to give us some feedback, or need more help? As always, the Typepad Support team is here for you!

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