Hi there,
I am looking for the best way to warehouse pictures for use with RW6, in order not to have those large picture galleries included directly in the project.
As it is now I have my pictures placed in Dropbox, but I don’t know if, and how, I might be able to use this as a warehouse for pictures in RW6. Or what other opportunities I might have ( I don’t want to use iCloud)
If anybody have some experiences to share on this subject I am all ears 
One combo I really like is Flickr plus the app F-stop ($0.99). When you upload to Flickr it automatically makes several versions/sizes of the image: and this can be helpful for a number of reasons. I find the Flickr interface a bit awkward, especially for getting the link to a particular image at a specific size. I find F-stop works great with Flickr: quick, easy, efficient.
If you’ve got a legacy Dropbox account with the old fashioned ‘public’ folder present, then anything you put in that folder can be hotlinked to - so you could reuse those images and embed them into your website. But if you have a newer Dropbox account it will not work, for the simple reason that Dropbox displays those files inside an advertising wrapper and redirects users to a download instead.
There are numerous RapidWeaver addons that support warehoused images stored on your own web server. WeaverPix would be the obvilous choice for professional photographers, but many stack elements also exist that support image warehousing: https://rapidweavercentral.info/stackcentral/
Hi @peterkroman
You could always try this free warehouse image stack:-
http://www.stellarstacks.com/stacks/warehousedimage/
Personally when I warehouse images I just FTP them to a subfolder on one of my hosting plans, publish, then grab the link. Simple, reasonably fast and uncomplicated by any now or future nonsense introduced by Flickr/Dropbox or anyone else.
Good luck.
Thanks for the advices.
I think I will try the simple way you suggest @stuart
I can’t really see the point of anything other than @stuart’s approach.
I use the now-famous “Stuart approach” much of the time myself. But there are key benefits to using Flickr at times. I use Flickr to share photos with other people, so most of the photos I want to use are typically at Flickr anyways. The fact that Flickr auto-creates multiple sizes of your images is very helpful. This means I can upload the original version of a photo, and then I can select the best web-appropriate size from their auto-created versions. And in cases where I need a small image that then links (e.g. lightbox) to a full-scale version of the photo: I’ve got both of those created automatically by Flickr again.
Using F-stop as my Flickr client takes me as little, sometimes less, time that using the FTP approach. (And that doesn’t count time I’d need for cropping, resizing, etc.). The Flickr approach isn’t always the best approach. E.g. I use a lot of SVGs created in OmniGraffle: simpler in those cases to use a direct FTP. But Flickr can be a very good complementary approach.
Those do seem pretty good reason’s, @Mathew.
Thanks @Mathew,
I think a need for your solution might occur sometime along the way. But can you please enlighten me a little about F-stop? I simply don’t know what it is.
@peterkroman Robb beat me to it. F-stop is a Mac app that you can only purchase on the App Store. Currently it’s $1.99. (Apparently it has gone up in price.) I much prefer working with F-stop to upload, edit, get links for, and download Flickr images.
I’m trying to understand the value of warehousing images. My site is 30MBs with all the images included. I can’t imagine that there’s a benefit to me to do image warehousing. When does it make sense to do it?
I suppose when the project starts to feel unwieldy, slow to load, slow to add new stuff. For smaller sites I’m not sure there’s as much point but if the site is going to grow, it makes sense to warehouse from the start. Or host your photos elsewhere as stated previously.
Rob
There’s probably several reasons for warehousing: and it’s possible none apply to you (@bruce). At one point, and perhaps still, RW was “funky” in regards to remembering images included in a project. So if you moved your RW project to a different part of your hard drive, or later moved it entirely to an external hard drive RW would lose track of the images. This may be better now but I’m not sure.
Another reason is when you use multiple computers (as I do). And again this relates to the funkiness with which RW remembers images. When images are warehoused I don’t have to worry about working on my project file from multiple computers. (And, again, RW may have fixed this issue.)
A third reason for warehousing is multi-purposing images. If you know you’re only going to use an image on your website project then this isn’t important. But I often use my images in several places: web page, PDF documents, etc. etc. So warehousing keeps a consistent location for my images no matter what software/product I’m creating.
With warehousing you can have real picture names. I just do as Stuart said. a folder (or actually different folders for different projects) that I upload to with “_” replacing spaces in names. Then paste the warehoused link in a text box or pretty foto, or even a forum.
To make the posting or using easier, I copy the file name to a spread sheet where I concoctenate the full web address, and an additional column that adds the to the ends for copying and pasting.
I started doing this when my main site was about 130 MB, RW was many versions ago, and my computer was not as fast. Exporting the site was about 20 min after each change.
+1
Another benefit of warehousing is that should you decide (at some point in the future) to move away from RapidWeaver and use another publishing platform to manage your website with, you would already have all your images neatly named and organised into folders. It would make rebuilding a website far easier for you or the next person. It would also help to streamline backups.
Another reason to learn how to warehouse is it opens up new possibilities. Will’s wonderful Playlister stack and the beta version of his ProGallery stack are simply two examples of great stacks that work super well if you know how to created warehoused files.
The biggest impediment to warehousing is people learning how to do it. But once you’ve learned it’s super simple, and way more powerful, than drag/drop.
Thanks for all the very fine tips and advice. I am in process of learning the benefits of warehousing pictures, and I am sure that I will get the full potential of it at some point in time
thanks for the ideas so far.
As I have a Flickr site and need some photos resized, I am thinking this may be an idea for our next site.
Are there any settings I need to ensure in Flickr to get this to work? Privacy? Ideally I just want to use a folder in Flickr to house all my photos for the website, but still be able to use Flickr website for other uses.
May I ask, how can I find the source URL within F-Stop? Thanks