In Expose, creating your collections/albums and populating them with images and movies is done entirely with the Album Manager.

To go to your Album Manager,

• Log on to your Backend Administrator (www.yoursite.com/administrator)
• Go To Components->Expose->Manage Albums
• Log in to the Album Manger using your password (default password is "manager")

Overview of the Album Manager:

Creating a Collection:

A collection is a set of albums under one title. You can have multiple albums in one collection, for example:

Photos from 2005 in the above overview picture is a collection and "Vacation", "Wedding" are its albums.

To create a Collection:

• Click on "Create Collection" in the Album Manager
• Enter Collection Name and click Create
• Optional: To add description to the collection: Select collection, enter text in the Description area and right-click over text area and select "apply to commit any changes you have made". See Overview picture above.

Creating an Album:

Go to Album Manager and:

• Click on Create Album
• Enter Album Name, select collection (or top level if no collections are present) and click Create
• Optional: To add description to the collection: Select album, enter text in the Description area and right-click over text area and select "apply to commit any changes you have made". See Overview picture above.

Uploading Media

Before uploading any files, create at least one album and select it from the Album List. You can only add files to a selected and opened album! Media can now be added to your album in three ways: using the ‘Upload photos’ button, the ‘Upload videos’ button or the ‘Add from bucket’ button. All  three upload buttons are found in the Upload Buttons area of the Album Manager.

Upload photos: Choose image files from your computer and follow the instructions to upload. Files will be resized, copyrighted and watermarked depending on your settings.

Upload videos: Choose flash video files from your computer and follow the instructions to upload. Files will NOT BE resized, copyrighted or  watermarked. Files must also be flash videos with a .FLV file extension. Convert them before uploading.

Add from bucket: This allows adding photos and videos from a "bucket". The bucket is a folder on your web server where you can upload the  source images and videos for later adding to your media collection. You might find it easier to FTP your files instead of using the uploading features in Album Manager (or bypass upload problems), which is where the bucket would come in handy. Files (photos and .FLV flash videos) must be manually transferred to the ‘bucket’ at <joomla!_root>/components/com_expose/expose/manager/bucket/ Once the files are transferred to this location (don't use subdirectories in the /bucket directory), click the ADD FROM BUCKET button, select the appropriate file(s) from the list (in Windows Internet Explorer, you can use SHIFT or CONTROL button to select multiple files at once) and follow the instructions.

In the window for adding media from the bucket you can filter the list of files by entering the bits of file name to look for into the filter text input and pressing Enter. For example, if you upload some images in to a vacation folder inside the bucket, and some other images into a wedding folder in the bucket, you can shrink the list to see only the images in the vacation folder by entering vacation/ into the filter text input and pressing Enter.  The filter applies simultaneously to the list of photos and videos.

Editing Titles, Dates, Locations & Descriptions

To create / edit the description associated with collections / albums or photos / videos,browse to and select the appropriate item. Enter the item  description in either the Album Description text area or the Media Description text area as appropriate.

Once you have completed the description, place your mouse over the text and right-click (or ctrl-click on Mac OS X). Choose APPLY DESCRIPTION CHANGES from the menu to save the changes.

To change the Titles of your albums, select the album of interest and then click the RENAME button below the collections/album list. To change the Titles of your media, simply double-click the Title itself.

Adding dates and locations to your media can be a nice addition to your collection. Create / edit Dates  and Locations by double-clicking the appropriate textareas for the desired media file. In many cases, the same Location, Date, Description and Title may apply to an entire album. Expose makes it easy to propagate this data from one file to all the files in the same album. Simply right-click the file which already has the desired Location, Date, Description and/or Title and select the appropriate “Apply to rest’ option.

Creating Thumbnails

Thumbnails for photos are automatically created so no further action is required once the images have been successfully uploaded. To preview the thumbnails, select the media item of interest, the thumbnail should appear in the Media Thumb Preview area.

For videos, thumbnails are manually generated from a frame of the movie. Start by browsing to the video of interest and selecting the video file in the Media List. The Media Thumb Previews will be blank, but click this area to open the ’Video Preview’ window.

Play the video until an appropriate frame is located and pause the video. Click the ‘Capture to thumbnail’ button to save the frame as the video thumbnail. Repeat this process as necessary to achieve the desired results.

To give your collection a most impressive appearance, you should create different collection and album thumbnails. These will be displayed when visitors to your site browse your albums. The only limitation is that collection/album thumbnails must already exist as photo or video thumbnails. To create a collection/album thumbnail, browse to the photo or video which has the thumbnail you desire.
Select the photo/video and ensure the thumbnail is displayed in the Media Thumb Preview area. Next, click the CREATE ALBUM THUMB button and select the desired collection/album. To confirm that the thumbnail is being used for the collection/album, select the collection/album from the Album List. The thumbnail should appear in the Album Thumb Preview area. Repeat this process for any remaining albums or to replace existing collection/ album thumbs.

Moving and Deleting Collections, Albums and files

Reorganizing or destroying existing albums and media is self-explanatory. Use the buttons in the Manage Albums and Manage Media areas to manage your collection.