How to upload photographs

Marko's "if a course 2 can do it, anybody can" guide to uploading photographs to your MIT webspace

For Windows XP. using 'Picasa' to create the thumnail images and the webpages and using 'WinSCP' to copy them over to the internet.

Sorry if this is very basic/long, but I tried to write it such that even a complete klutz like me can't get it wrong! Once you've got the hang of it this whole process takes about 5 minutes.

It'll be full of spelling/typing mistakes and awful grammar no doubt, so feel free to use the log in and then edit page buttons at the top right hand side of this page to correct it/add advice to it as you see fit.

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Marko

Step One

Download the two files located here:

http://web.mit.edu/cosic/Public/CME/
(right click on each one in turn and select 'save to disk')

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Once they're finished downloading, open each file and do the usual 'yes, yes, whatever' installation routine. (if in doubt, hit 'i accept', 'yes', 'next', 'ok' or 'finish')

Step Two

Now we're going to use the 'Picasa' program we just installed to look at our pictures and select the ones we want to upload.

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Open the 'Picasa' program and (after the usual 'i accept', 'yes', 'next', 'ok' or 'finish' routine) it will hunt through your computer for all your photographs and make lots of thumbnail images of them to make it easy to look through them. This may take some time, but it will only need to do it once.

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You should end up with something looking like this:

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Double-clicking on any of the thumbnails should open up the picture as shown below:

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You can crop/straighten the picture, take out red eyes, mess with colours and contrast etc as you please using the buttons on the left. You can also add a caption by clikcing and typing in the box with the red arrow pointing to it then hitting <enter>. When you're happy with the picture, click on the 'back to library' button in the top left corner of the screen.

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We now want to select which images we want in our webpage. To do this, hold down the <ctrl> key and click on the images - the ones you have selected will have a blue border around them:

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If you'd like to select all the pictures in that folder, there is a 'select all' button you can click on next to the green arrow below:

Step Three

Here's the bit where we make the webpage! Opposite the folder title (and green arrow) is an 'actions' button with a down arrow on it. Click it, and click on the 'make a webpage' option:

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You'll be presented with a box with lots of options as shown below. The red arrow is askign how big you want your pictures to be. 640 pixels is a bit small, 1024 is a bit big - 800 pixels is a good size, but it is up to you. The bigger you make them the more space they're going to take up and the longer they'll take to download. The blue arrow is jsut asking for a page title. The green arrow is asking you where on your computer you want to put the 'webpage' it makes. I'd reccommend putting it somewhere you can find it again!

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Click 'next' when you're done and you'll get another screen. There are a few options as to how your page will look - take your pick! When you're don, click 'finish' and your computer will work away for a bit with a progress indicator on the bottom right:

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When it finishes a new window will open up, showing you your new webpage. Clicking on the thumbnails will bring up a bigger version of the picture. Remember that caption you typed in earlier? The software puts it into the picture title for you when it creates the webpage! (green arrow)

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Your webpage is now finished - all we have to do now is copy it from your computer to the web, and we'll need the 'WinSCP' progeam to do that.

Step Four

'WinSCP' is what lets you copy the webpage from your computer onto you MIT webspace. Open up the 'WinSCP' program and you will get a screen that looks like this:

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Type athena.dialup.mit.edu into the box that says Host Name

Type your kerberos ID into the box that says User name

Type your kerberos password into the box that says password

This is a pain in the bum, so once you've done that click on the 'save' button. You'll get a new warning screen telling you that if somebody hacks into your laptop they can steal your kerberos password, doctor your photographs and rack up huge athena printing bills, or words to that effect:

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If you're worried, click cancel and you'll jsut ahve to type in all that rubbish every time you want to upload photographs. If you're as lazy as me, just click on ok. Another box will pop up asking you to give the 'session' a name. Anything will do, then click ok:

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You should now have a screen that looks like this:

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Click 'login' and the usual 'i accept', 'yes', 'next', 'ok' or 'finish' when the new warning message comes up. (you'll only get this message once). You should now have a screen that looks something like this:

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The files/folders on the left hand side are on your computer (top red arrow). The files/folders on the right hand side are on the MIT computer (top green arrow). Everything you put inside the www folder (bottom green arrow) will be visible to the world. The example folder (bottom red arrow) is the webpage we made earlier. All we have to do to make the page visible to the world is copy the example folder into the www folder.

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Open up the www folder by double clicking on it. Now everything on the right hand side is what's on the internet.

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