See the About the site page.

First navigate to any photo that you've uploaded. Then click on the 'Photo options...' button on the top of the page to open the photo edit drop-down box. Then click the Submit button after 'Make this photo my user profile thumbnail'.

You can backup your data as well as your your source photos. In your account edit drop-down box, choose either 'backup data' or 'backup data and photos'. You can download either an XML file with your data, or a ZIP archive of your photos, which will include the XML file.

Currently only JPG files are accepted, and the file limit is 8MB. --Kim 11/12/09

Only JPEG photos, AVI movies, and ZIP archives are accepted. Files must end in .jpg, .JPG, .avi, .AVI, .zip, .ZIP.

The easiest thing to do is to throw everything you want to upload into one big ZIP file and upload that.

Maximum accepted JPEG file size is 5MB. Maximum AVI file size is 30MB. Maximum ZIP size is 200MB. Any file types larger than these sizes are simply rejected with a warning message after they are uploaded.

If you want people to be able to order prints, or to download full resolution images, you should upload the largest resolution image that you can, such as the original file from your digital camera.

If you don't care about this and you simply want to upload as fast as possible, like when you're travelling and the connection is slow, you should upload images that are 550 pixels on a side.

The reason for this is that LtL generates 550 pixel wide thumbnails for the photos pages. If you upload a 550px image then LtL doesn't have to generate a separate thumbnail for it, thereby speeding up upload (thumbnail generation) and assuring a higher quality image (again, since LtL doesn't need to create a smaller thumbnail).

Directories within ZIP archives are flattened. Duplicate files within the same ZIP file after flattening are overwritten.

No. You create albums at the same time that you upload photos. To create an new album, select some photos or movies to upload. On the upload page is an option to put the uploaded items into a new album, or into an existing album.

Yes, you can add these directly to images before uploading. Most major photo management programs support adding titles, captions and tags directly to images into their IPTC fields.

Larry the Llama looks for these IPTC as well as EXIF fields when adding images. EXIF fields contain things like shutter speed, aperture, date, camera make and model, etc. Optional IPTC fields contain things like title, caption and tags. Whenever Larry the Llama finds an IPTC field he will try and use any titles, captions and tags found there. If he's able to use these, you will see them next to the thumbnails on the upload success page.

Note: Tags entered directly on the upload page will override any tags found in image files. Titles in image files, if found, will override the actual file name as the image name.

If you use iPhoto for Mac OS X, you can download the iPhotoToGallery plugin by Zach Wily. With this plugin you can view your albums, create new albums, and add images to existing albums. I've tested version 0.65 with iPhoto 5 and 6.

The best things about the plugin, other than not having to create ZIP files, are the upload status indicator and the ability to export image titles and comments (captions) directly from iPhoto.

After you install the plugin a tab called 'Gallery' will appear in the Share > Export... menu. To create a new gallery, click 'Add Gallery...' and enter larrythellama.com as the Gallery URL along with your LtL user name and password. Ignore the advanced options. Once you click 'OK' your albums should load. If they don't, contact us.

You can now add selected images in iPhoto to existing albums or create new albums. If you create a new album, ignore the 'Short name' field. If you're traveling, the 'Scale images...' option is handy. Choose 550x550 as that's the size of the biggest LtL thumbnail.

If you use other photo management software such as Picasa, the easiest thing to do still is to upload ZIP files.

Tags are an easier way to group similar photos together than albums. They are much simpler as well. For example, there is no meta-data associated with tags, such as date and headline or story.

Tags are simple to add to and remove from photos. There is virtually no management of tags. You just type in the tags you want to assign to a photo or movie and voila, you can easily view all of your barbie doll or plant growing project photos.

Tags are comma-separated. For example, you could enter these three tags:

hiking, Yosemite's lakes, my dog "buffy"

You can use any characters in your tags that you like...EXCEPT commas. If you really want to use commas, bug me about it, or use hyphens instead.

There are four ways to add tags:

1. Image files: You can add tags (and captions) directly into image files before uploading. See the upload section of this FAQ for more details.
2. Upload page: There is a field on the upload page that lets you add the same tags to all images in an upload batch. Note: Tags entered on the upload page will override any tags found within image files.
3. QuickEdit page: Add tags on an image-by-image basis for an entire album, or use the 'Apply to all photos...' button to apply the tags from the first image to all images within an album.
4. Photo options page: And of course, you can add tags to an individual image on its photo options drop-down box.

Well...not yet, but yes, there will eventually be special tags.

Basically, I'd like to be able to allow users to designate a particular tag name that will be featured on their user home page, such as "Daily snapshots", or "Snaps". That way users can easily tag photos that they would like to have featured on their home page. I'll let people know when this is done.

Not yet. But eventually we would like to provide a structure by which you can nest tags, just like you can nest albums. This way you could have the tags "tiger" "cuckoo bird" "asiatic lion" all grouped under the tag "favorite animals". Again, I'll let people know when this is done.

There are three ways to do this:

1. Web: Go to the maps page. A bubble will popup wherever you click with the gps coordinates. Starting in map view, zooming in, and switching to satellite view works pretty well.
2. Google Earth: If you don't have it yet, download Google Earth (formerly Keyhole). This method is much faster than the web interface. Make sure you change Lat/Lon in the preferences from "Degrees, Minutes, Seconds" to just "Degrees". You should see the coordinates of the pointer at the bottom of the screen, something like "Pointer lat 36.222859 lon -112.356482". Create a new Placemark to copy and paste the value.
3. GPS unit: Buy a GPS unit and carry it with you on your travels. This is the most accurate method and saves time hunting down locations when you upload your photos. I bought the simple and reliable Garmin eTrex from Amazon.com for under $100. The battery lasts a long time, is waterproof, and tells you sunset/rise and moonset/rise times, handy for photography.

RSS is a format for syndicating news and information for the web. It is typically used by news-oriented sites and personal weblogs. It provides a good way to keep up to date with changes on web sites without having to keep visiting them and checking for updates.

You 'subscribe' to an RSS news feed with a program called an RSS aggregator. For example, if you use Mozilla Thunderbird as your mail reader, you can subscribe to the Site Updates RSS feed and receive messages in a virtual inbox when new things are added to the site.

Currently only journal entries are published in the RSS feeds. We could add photos and albums to the feeds later if people find them useful.

Yes, you can hide your feed from others by selecting the 'disable' option on your account settings box on your home page.

Hits are ignored if a logged in owner views their own pages.

Likewise, multiple hits from the same remote IP address within 30 minutes of each other are not counted more than once.

You may have noticed that more and more parts of the site have a little message below entry textboxes that say something like "Some XHTML allowed". XHTML is basically a much more strict version of HTML that is more like XML. HTML is an incredibly loose language while XML is a very strict language. XHTML falls somewhere in between.

The reason we have started restricting text entry in some areas to XHTML is to prevent html errors on the site, where we allow html as input (such as comments, captions, and journals), and, more importantly, to prevent bad people from entering malicious stuff.

For example, if someone entered <a href="somepage.html">click here and forgot to put the </a> at the end, it would probably screw up the whole page.

If you're interested in reading up more on XHTML, wikipedia has a good page on it, including common errors.

We do all of the developing on a Mac PowerBook and test things in the Firefox and Safari browsers. We know, it doesn't make the most sense when most people are using Internet Explorer. But hell, MSIE sucks and developing for it sucks even more, and that's just the way it is for now.

So, we try to make the best effort to work around the bugs in MSIE but it doesn't always happen. If you notice something that doesn't look or work right in MSIE, please let us know and we'll do our best to fix it.

In the meantime...