In this tutorial we are using Mozilla Firefox on a Mac system. If you're running Windows the appearance is slightly different. Click the screenshots for a larger view.

Step 1: Assemble and Upload Media

When you first access Tuzulo the home page is for uploading your media:

Tuzulo allows you to upload many items grouping and organizing them into collections. If you want to upload new items into a new collection the home page is the only place you do that. Adding items to an existing collection is discussed later.

The home page is divided into 3 main areas:

• Image and file selector button.
• The safety flag checkbox.
• The Upload button which starts the upload process.

You can click on the icons to expose information about each section.

If you click again on the info icon the tip area will scroll back up. If you click on the Close button the area will quickly snap shut.

To upload media, first click Select Images and Files... A dialog box, similar to the following, will appear:

Navigate and select images and files for upload. You can select several files at once up to the limit. You can use the selector repeatedly.

Each selected file appears with its own progress bar and cancel button. If you click the item is removed immediately.

If you reach the limit, a warning message will appear:

The warning message indicates you've exceeded the amount you can upload for this upload session and further indicates that not everything you selected made it into the upload queue. Selecting again or canceling an item will clear this message.

If everything you've chosen is work or family safe, check the box.

Choose this flag carefully and responsibly. If the upload doesn't have the flag checked then there will be a content blocker installed so your users cannot view the page until their age is confirmed. new

Once you've selected all your media and chosen the safety flag appropriately, click Upload to start the process. All the information areas will disappear and the Select button will grey out, which indicates you cannot select more items while the upload process sends all the items in the file queue.

Each file will progressively upload then disappear from the list once sent. How long each takes depends on how big it is and how much bandwidth you have. There is a progressive byte count, the visual progress bar and a time estimate for each item as it's sent to the Tuzulo servers.

You can, however, cancel items individually by clicking the cancel button while the upload is running. The item will not appear in the collection. There is a danger, however, that if you clear all the items in the queue you'll be left with an empty collection.

After this process completes the system automatically takes you to the management page and you're ready to begin the next step.

Step 2: Select Publishing Codes

After uploading you're taken to the /upload page which contains all the functions necessary to control and publish your gallery either as a whole or in pieces.

The /upload management page, which uses a private key, is divided into two main areas, the top and the bottom:

The top part of the page looks like:

The top part contains the controls and codes for publishing your media.

It's divided into three areas:

• The status bar, which controls the name of the collection and the safety flag.
• The toolbar which contains controls for previewing, layouts, collection appending or deleting the collection.
• The codes area, which you will use to link your collection to another web site.

The bottom part looks like:

The bottom part of the page controls individual items inside the collection.

We didn't ask you to pick a thumbnail size when you upload. That's because you can dynamically change your thumbnail size, which, by the way, is unique to Tuzulo.

Use the toolbar's Size drop down menu and pick a size which you want for your thumbnails.

It might help to see what your visitors see, so click the toolbar's Preview link and you'll be taken to the collection's public landing page:

Since this page is public and meant to be shared it uses a public key (which is very different from the /upload page's private key).

As you own this collection, the space where the advertisements normally go is replaced by a simplified toolbar. Here you can adjust the thumbnail size again to quickly fine tune how big you want the thumbnails on the linked page. Once you've got this figured out, go back to the /upload management page by clicking "Back to Upload."

Your visitors will not have access to this toolbar. If the upload was done anonymously, without an account, the toolbar will disappear after a short while or immediately if you switch browsers or computers.

Step 3: Publish your Codes

The last step involves copying a set of codes and pasting them into whatever posting, blog you have.

Go back to your /upload page:

The codes area is the third area. There are a number of flavors of codes which you can use - refer to codes to learn about the differences between them. Click the More button below the codes to expose additional codes for the collection, including Markdown and direct (hot) links.

To publish onto another web site select the appropriate code flavor, click (the entire code box is automatically copied) and finally paste to the destination site.

You're done.

Managing your Upload

The /upload page contains a full set of functions for controlling your upload package. Tuzulo's tools generally don't use a "Save" or "Submit" button for saving any changes - the changes you make are saved immediately.

Removing or Publishing Individual Items

Looking at the bottom part of the page, each item has a small toolbar:

You can remove items individually here by clicking on the corresponding Remove button. Deletes are immediate (after confirmation) and there is no undo. But most importantly, the codes are updated to reflect the deleted item(s).

Tuzulo doesn't (at this time) guarantee an upload ordering which means you may not like the sequence ordering of items in your collection. This is easy to change with drag and drop:

Grab the toolbar, click and hold then drag up or down to change the sequence. Release the mouse button when done.

Giving a Collection a Title

If you glide the mouse near the collection's current title (Your Upload), you'll see:

Clicking in that area brings up:

which you can use to give the collection a short title. This string will appear on the public facing pages where appropriate. If you're a registered user it also changes how your history links work.

To remove the title use an empty string. The title will revert back to Your Upload.

Editing Images

Each image is "editable" to a certain degree. Again, looking at the bottom part of the /upload page, the thumbnails are clickable:

If clicked the thumbnail will expand into:

which contains tools for 1) rotation and 2) the 9-wise hinting for the cropping system. You may rotate in 90° increments clockwise or anti-clockwise. You can also set a "hint" for the cropping system to suggest that a more interesting area of the image is in a particular direction. Cropping is explained in detail here.

Use the show/hide controller in section 2 to expose the 9-wise cropping system. You can either specify a direction or reset the cropping hint:

In the example above, the gravity has been specified as Center. If the more interesting part of the image is somewhere else choose an appropriate direction.

Cropping is used when the image is originally rectangular but needs to be square based on the layout.

Specifying the hint is optional. If you are in the habit of using constant aspect ratio layouts then cropping is irrelevant except for the square thumbnails used internally to Tuzulo, which your visitors will not see.

Only an image can be edited this way, files such as PDFs are read-only.

Appending to a Collection

If you've canceled everything before the upload was finished, you'll be left with an empty collection:

The same message appears if you manually delete all the items from the collection.

You have really two options: delete the collection entirely or add items to the collection.

Both of those options are accessed via the toolbar.

Extending a collection is exactly like uploading except instead of constructing a new collection Tuzulo will attach the items to the current collection. This means you can construct media galleries of any size. Be sensible, however, as your visitors may not want to wait for really large galleries to load.

There are a number of areas on the append or add page:

• Simplified status bar with safety flag adjuster.
• Simplified toolbar with Preview and Back to Upload.
• Gallery area listing at most 10 thumbnails from the collection with filtering.
• Upload area (areas 4 and 5) which functions identically to the front page uploader.

The process of selecting items for upload is identical.

Once complete you're taken back to the /upload page for code selection and publishing, just like on a new upload from the home page.

We include the safety flag adjuster on the Extend Collection page because you might upload items which change the collection's work or family safe concept.

Notes

• You can update the safety flag by changing the value in the status bar.
• The toolbar repeats at the bottom of the /upload page if the number of items in your collection is > 2.