As of today, Monday, March 8, 2010, all active members* may upload their doll and action figure photos* to

Image Galleries!

Give your photos a SHORT title, because the images and title will randomly rotate to the home page, and long titles will cause the images to misalign--one or two words is best.  Then give us a complete description of the image in the caption box.  Finally, choose an "album" for your images. 

What are albums and why should you choose one?  When people come to the photo albums slash image galleries, they can choose to browse them by "albums" just as you might browse physical photo albums at home.  One day they might only want to see Barbies, another day photos of how to do certain projects, yet another day only Tonner dolls.  So we offer them the option to click on an "album" to see only those photos identified by that aspect.

  Currently we have the following albums in place:

• Ball-jointed Dolls
• Barbie
• Child Dolls
• Disney
• Do It Yourself
• Effanbee Dolls
• Law Enforcement Action Figures
• Mannequins
• Military Action Figures
• Odds 'n' Ends
• Other Action Figures
• Other Sixth Scale Dolls
• Tonner Dolls

If you don't find an album that fits your photo, use "Odds'n'Ends" for now and we can make a new album if appropriate.

I will probably merge Effanbee with Tonner and merge LE with military action figures now that we've opened the galleries to everyone, and I am very open to both any new albums you'd like to see and name changes you desire.  For example, Eric--should we call "Mannequins, "Dollequins?"

Also, your photos will ALWAYS be searchable by your own personal album, and you don't have to choose that when uploading pix--the forum will automatically do that for you.  Then anyone can go to the Image Gallery and click on your name from a drop-down list and view only your pix.  OR, they can click on your name, then look at just your BJD pix. 

Finally, the search feature can search across the entire gallery by title, description, or partial words to find pictures.  Or you can go to just one album and search there.

Some other features.  You can look at the photo albums in thumbnail (TN) format (default) with 12, 24, 36, or 48 TNs per page.  You can also click on the first picture and then scroll through full-size photo by full-size photo, which I imagine would take days, as there are already over 1000 photos in the albums. 

Short answer--this is a full-featured Image Gallery.  I hope you enjoy using it, and please don't be intimidated about using it!

* by "your" photos we mean your photos.   This is not for photos taken by anyone else, not promo pix, pic off the web, etc, but your pix of your dolls.  As always you can post any doll and AF pix on the message board, but as far as hosting goes we only want to host YOUR pix of YOUR dolls and action figures and related items (for example, doll houses).  Thank-you, folks!

* obviously I'm not becoming photo host to the world.  Drive-by folks who come by and think they've found a photo host will have their images deleted.  This is a perk for active forum members.