The folks at Footnote.com have been busy. Several new changes were added to the site earlier today, including:
Connections: In the gallery, you can now drag one image on top of another and then describe how the two images are connected. Connections might be images from the same document, two documents describing the same person, place or thing, etc. This is the first step of some more changes planned for Connections in the future.
Upload: The upload process has several improvements. First, you can multi-select when you choose images. You browse to your folder and, by holding down the shift key, you can select a number of images in a list; or by holding down the ctrl key (command for a Mac), you can select multiple individual images. This should make upload a lot faster and easier. In addition, you can now upload more than five files at once.
Gallery Organization: Footnote.com now has the ability to create "Collections" within a gallery to create sub-sets of images. You can drag images into the collections, or you can use a select checkbox to select a bunch of images and then add them to a collection. The company also updated the grid view of the gallery to allow users to select the number of images that are loaded when they come to the page and to resize the thumbnails, using a slider bar in the upper right area of the page. One other Gallery feature that can be very useful, but is likely to go unnoticed, is that you can now add your own name for any image in your gallery, and it will show for you throughout the site. Previously, if a Footnote image was named Page 1, you could not change the name of that image. Now you can give your own title to any image in your gallery and also change the description. For now, these personal names aren't being used for search or displayed to other users, but it's likely they will be at a future time.
Embed a Spotlight: One other early addition is the ability to embed a spotlight that you create on your own web page. On the spotlight page there is a link that says, "Link & Embed." Clicking that link opens a pane with direct links to the page and embedded links for the spotlight or the image. You can even choose from 3 sizes for the embed options.
Tour Page: Footnote.com has also added a new Tour page that provides an introduction to many of the features of Footnote. You can "take the tour" at: http://www.footnote.com/tour.php.
While not yet available, the company has already announced that changes to the search mechanism will be available before long, too.
