Specifying the Image Source Folder

In the In-String Placeholders and Text Validation topic, we have already discussed how to set up predefined text layers in product templates. This topic dwells on how to add image layers with pre-selected pictures, which can be chosen in the web-to-print designer.

For example, you can use image elements with predefined content in designs in which users can personalize, say, only a product photo. In this case, you can create a single template for all product variations. If your design requires too many images to be used as predefined options, you can organize them in a separate folder and link this folder to the image layer. When personalizing the image element, your users will be selecting images from the specified folder and Customer's Canvas will not allow them to switch to another source, including images that are supposed to be loaded from social networks. Also, this approach is useful when you change options for an image layer after the PSD template has been created.

To demonstrate this feature, let us set up the /europe_photos/ folder as an image source for an image layer:

1. Customer's Canvas will be searching for the specified path in the public images folder. So, we will first make sure that the public folder has been set up. To perform this, open web.config and find the PublicGalleryFolder parameter. Its value should be PublicGalleryFolder (it is the default value for this parameter); if it is not, change the value to PublicGalleryFolder.
2. Make sure that the /europe_photos/ subfolder is in the /PublicGalleryFolder/ folder. If there is no such subfolder, then create it and place some images there.
3. Create the /London/ subfolder under /europe_photos/ and move the default tower.jpg and harrods.jpg images to it.
4. In Photoshop, create a new file, add an image layer, and put the <IASF_/europe_photos/> marker into the layer name. Here, /europe_photos/ is a path to the folder from which it will allow users to select content for the image layer. The path is relative to the public images folder, which we have set to /PublicGalleryFolder/.
5. Save the template.
6. Load the template into the web-to-print designer.
7. Open the Gallery by double-clicking the image. Note that the open file dialog displays no tabs and contains only images from the /europe_photos/ folder and its subfolder.

   

   Note

   If you want to restrict public folders with the <IASF> marker and still need to allow users to upload their own images, set the showTabsInRestrictedMode property of the GalleryDialog configuration section to true.

In Photoshop, you can embed image options into templates by using multi-value items.

For more information about the Gallery, see the Using the Image Gallery topic.

See Also

Manual

• In-String Placeholders and Text Validation
• Setting up Fields with Predefined Values
• Using the Image Gallery