So, as you begin creating your own activities, I suspect you’ll find a trend that I’ve often found… you end up using the same pictures over and over again.  And, sometimes those pictures happen to come from your camera, or maybe you had it on your iPad, or maybe you downloaded it from a web site of free icons, or….  You “get the picture” (pun totally intended).

When you are building activities, you reuse pictures, and you’ll end up reusing sounds.  As a way of making it easy to reuse these activity assets, our system comes with a library that allows you to store pictures and sounds for later re-use.  And, keeping with the philosophy of the app, we have made it easy to use.

Going back to our world famous “blue background with yellow square” activity and entering “Edit” mode, up in the top right navigation area is the “…” button.  Tapping on the “…” button when nothing else is the “currently selected item” causes the app to present “Advanced Options” window.  This window contains a number of advanced tools that you can use, and one of them is the “Picture Library”.

The picture library is where you can store pictures that you will reuse in your various activities.  Tap on “Picture Library” in the “Advanced” window and you’ll see the following display:

Well, that’s not very interesting.  An empty picture library.  Huh… we’ll probably we need to put some pictures in it (note, your picture library may already have pictures in it if someone from your team added some already).  To add pictures to the picture library, touch the “+” button on the bottom of the picture library window.

Here, we are going to add the world famous “Jami” dog picture into our library.  I started by typing a name of the picture that will help me find it later.  Then, I filled in the description of the picture. Next, I touched the “Select” button at the bottom of the window.  This allows me to select a picture from my device’s picture library, where I of course choose Jami!

After tapping on “Use”, the picture is placed in the “Pictures” window.  I then touch “Save” and presto-magico, Jami is part of the picture library!!

Reasons for Using Picture Libraries

So, why is this so great?  Well, for a lot of reasons:

1. Using the Property Inspector, I can select Jami from the library quickly without having to dig through a bunch of pictures to find her
2. Jami can now be used by any member of my team as the library is shared with all of my team members.
3. Activities run faster and take up less space… Why?  When you reference a picture from your library instead of adding it to a specific activity, that picture is only downloaded one time no matter how many activities use it.
4. If you have a lot of activities and they all reference the same picture and then suddenly you discover there is a blemish on the picture and it needs to be replaced, all you need to do is update the library one time and all activities referencing that picture will automatically be uploaded at once.
5. Did you happen to notice the “Shared” button at the top of the picture library?  Other groups that have particularly interesting pictures can share pictures so that anybody, regardless of team can use them!  This is a HUGE time saver and makes it finding great pictures that are relevant for your work, a snap.

 

How would you….

1. How would you remove a picture from a picture library?  (Hint: Slide left…)