How-to Manual Part 1: The answers (OBSOLETE)

[G-P]

How to Follow people in the forums to create your News Feed:

 

You can follow people on the photo side (found in member center under Favorites), you can also follow people in the forums and if you do, you can create your own personalize "News Feed" to see where your favorite people are commenting in the forums!

 

1. Click on the Persons Icon, window pops up and click "follow"
   
2. Next click on your Name in the upper right hand corner of your screen up next to "inbox", "alerts" (see attached)
   
3. Then click on "News Feed" - your favorite forum buddies contributions will be there ready for you to catch up on!
   

[Leslie Reid]

A brief guide to navigating the site

 

Overall site organization

As I see it, there are two fairly independent sides to the site:

• The left-brain side is made up mostly of the locations accessed through the Explore, Learn, and Forums tabs—this is where the writing about photography happens, and most the content here is open to view by both members and non-members.
  
• The right-brain side is the database of photographs and member information—this is where your portfolio and public home page are. Some of this side is accessible only to you; some can be accessed by others.
  
• You can get to the right brain from the forum side through two doorways: the Portfolio link in the drop-down menu under your icon on the upper right corner of the Forum screen, and your Home Page link (which we’ll get to in a minute). You can get back to the left brain from your Portfolio or Home Page by clicking on one of the tabs (Explore, Learn, Forums) at the top of the screen.
  

The profile pages: your public image

Your public image is presented by your profile pages, and there’s a complication here: you have one on each side of the site’s brain.

• On the left-brain (Forum) side, if you click on your icon in a thread (which is how others would find you if they don’t use the member search feature), you’ll open a small box that contains your icon and a clickable link to your Profile Page. Click on that and you’ll find yourself in a box that allows you to pull up your past Forum posts and a few other things—this is how your existence is described to others on the left-brain side of the site. On the left of the left-brain Profile Page is a link to your Home Page—click on that, and you’re transported to your right-brain Profile Page (the one that either has or used to have bubbles as a background image). This is where the public can learn more about you and see your photo galleries.
  

• The second route to the left-brain (Forum-side) Profile Page is from the pull-down menu under your name at the top right corner of the forum page—click on Profile Page, and you’re at the left-brain screen with your Home Page link on the left; from there, proceed as described above to get to your public Profile Page (= your Home Page) on the right-brain side. Both of these profile pages are accessible to all.
  

• Just to keep it simple, don’t try clicking on Profile Page in the drop-down under your icon on the Forum page—it should take you to the right-brain Profile Page (= your Home Page), but at the moment it doesn’t. It does seem to work on all other pages, though.
  

Your private space

And then there’s your private side—the information that only you can see.

• Some of your private space is accessed through the Portfolio and Account buttons in your icon drop-down menu at the top of the screen. Your Portfolio is your private workplace—this is where you manage your galleries, and from here you have access to your private account information.
  
• The rest of your private information is accessed through the drop-down menu under your name at the top of the Forum screen. That name drop-down is an important one—there are several useful functions lurking in there, so explore it.
  

This all sounds complicated, and it is. The only way to really get a feel for how to navigate the site is to spend some time exploring it.

Edited March 10, 2017 by Leslie Reid

[Phil_Light]

Method for downloading your images (in original posting size) from your My Library section:

To download your own photos:

1. Go the My Portfolio page: https://www.photo.net/my/portfolio
   
2. Go the Link for My Library in the Left pane for navigation and click on it: https://www.photo.net/my/library/
   
3. That should give you a full page of your images. Keep clicking on the "Load More" button at the bottom of the image list until you find the image you want to download.
   
4. Hover over the image and note the "Download" link that appears at right bottom corner of the image. Click on the download image and you will start pulling down the original size image (large) you uploaded That's it!!
   

Edited March 10, 2017 by Leslie Reid

[Leslie Reid]

How to copy a photo from your portfolio into a forum thread

1. Go into your portfolio (mouse over your icon in the top right corner of this screen, and click on Portfolio in the drop-down menu)
   
2. Click on "Library" on the left side of your Portfolio screen
   
3. Scroll down until you find the image that you want to copy (or select the gallery and scroll within that)
   
4. Right click on the image, and choose "copy image address"
   
5. Now go back to the Forum page, and select the forum and then the thread that you want to copy the image to
   
6. In the "Post" box at the bottom of the thread page, add any text that you want to appear before the image, ending with <br> for a line break
   
7. Click on the icon in the editing bar that looks like a moon over mountains (15th from the left)
   
8. Type "Ctrl-V" (pc) or "Command-V" (mac) to paste in the URL for the image
   
9. Click on "Insert"; the image should appear in the box
   
10. Add any additional text, click on "Post Reply," and you're done.
    

Many thanks to Dieter Schaefer and Wayne Melia for explaining this.

Edited March 10, 2017 by Leslie Reid

[Leslie Reid]

How to change your screen name

1. First, check the member directory under the "Members" button at the top of this screen to be sure that the name you want to use isn't so close to someone else's name that they could be confused
   
2. Mouse over your icon at the top right corner of this screen
   
3. Click on My Account
   
4. Type in your desired screen name in the appropriate block
   
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "Save Information"
   
6. At that point, one of two things will happen:
   
7. If you get a banner saying "Account updated," you're set. It may take an hour or more for the change to be made on your profile page, but the chances are that it worked.
   
8. If no "Account updated" banner appears, then check for red lettering under the address and city blocks--if it's insisting that you must fill in something there, go ahead and fill in anything that strikes your fancy--"home" and "city" work just fine if you don't want the site to know those details (though the information does appear to remain private from other users). Now verify that the screen name you want is still in the screen name box, click on "Save Information," and the "Account updated" banner should appear. The new screen name should be operative within a couple of hours.
   

If this method did not work for you, there may be a difference in the way the site interacts with different browsers; please add a post to the How-to Manual thread Part 2 and describe what happened (...or didn't happen) and which browser you are using.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Leslie Reid

[Leslie Reid]

How to put a paragraph break into a comment under a photo:

 

You can add paragraph breaks in the comments under a photo if you use the edit function:

1. Type in your comment, putting in some kind of symbol to remind you where you want the paragraph breaks to go.
   
2. Submit the comment.
   
3. Click on "edit"
   
4. Replace the symbol you used with either < p> < p> or < br> < br> (without the spaces after the < )
   

Note that this is different from the method for creating paragraph breaks in forum posts--for those, see Reply#2

Edited March 10, 2017 by Leslie Reid

[Leslie Reid]

How to view photos recently uploaded to the site:

1. hover cursor over "explore" at the top of the page
   
2. click on "browse by categories"; a new page appears
   
3. scroll down and "recent images" (looks like a clock face) appears on the left-hand side with a green clickable button marked "view"; click it.
   

(Thanks to Wayne Melia for pointing this out)

Edited March 10, 2017 by Leslie Reid

[RussellCrowder]

I need to clean up my portfolio. Is there an easy way of merging galleries? Thank you in advance!