Electric Postcard Office Operating Manual

Adding new cards

To add new cards to your Postcard Rack you do the following:

Obtain the image

.gif or .jpeg files will show up as inline images in most browsers. A good size for a card is between 300x350 and 350x480 (or vice versa).

Make a thumbnail

A thumbnail of each image is also needed. I have found that 150 pixels in the larger dimension works well. Its name must be in the form:
<picture name>.small.<ext>
where .<ext> is .gif or .jpeg, etc.

Thus, if your main image is called cat.dog.mouse.jpg the thumbnail is called cat.doc.mouse.small.jpg

Put the pictures in your image directory

The simplest thing is to keep your images in a directory under the top level Postcard directory. The distribution, for instance, provides a some sample cards in the directory called Images. You can further divide this directory into other subdirectories: Images/cats, Images/erotica, etc.

If you want to have your postcard images in directories that are not under the top level Postcard directory this is fine BUT you will not have thumbnail images. The postcards will work fine - and so will the card rack, but the images shown in the cardrack will be full size.

Add an entry to a image database file

The database file contains all the information about a postcard: the path and filename for the image, the title, and the credits (artist,copyright, etc.).

There are 2 sample image database files in the distribution. They are in the Database directory and are called French.list and Color.list. Start by modifying and copying these files.

Return to Electric Postcard Operations: Introduction

Last modified: Sun Apr 7 00:44:48 1996