Best practices for adding images, like closeups to a Ponga picture

To show the invisible, it’s sometimes helpful to add another image or a close-up and anchor it to a particular area in the image. There are two ways to add closeups: One is quite directly as an attachment to a selection, the other is as a link. Let's take these one at a time:

Closeups as Attachments

To add images as “attachments” to selections, (as opposed to links,) you just drag the images to the comment box and release. You’ll see a box appear in the selection. Add any comments, and press Post.

Once you’ve attached an image to a selection in a Ponga picture, the picture(s) will appear in the sidebar when your viewers click on the selection.

To see the detail, just click on the attached image and it will appear as an overlay to the Ponga picture. If you want to view them in more detail, you can use your browser tools (usually a right-click) to open the image in a separate tab or to copy the link and paste it into a new browser window.

Note, images attached to comments are limited to 30MB and JPG and PNG file formats. Currently, TIFF formatted image files are not supported.

Closeups as Links

You can also add closeups as links to images that might be stored elsewhere on the web. This can be useful for referencing famous photos, or images from your own archives on:

• Photo storage sites such as Google Photos or Apple Photo (via iCloud)
• Archival storage such as Google Drive or Permanent.org
• Institutional websites such as museums, libraries, and other archives where you expect archives to be retained.

Keep in mind that if you're linking to external content you don't control, you want to consider whether the content will be permanently retained at that link (sometimes called a permalink.)

The mechanics of pasting a link to a close-up image is just the same as any other kind of content. Sometimes you may need to examine a site or test a link to be sure it returns the content you expect. Generally, you're looking for an image file URL that ends with .jpg or .png. If you're pulling a link from a news article, for example, you may need to right-click (or option-click on MacOS) to capture the so-called "deep link" of the image file. As a best practice, you want to include a reference to the source of images if you don't own them yourself.

Keep in Mind:

• Any link you include in the first comment in a selection that includes the "https://" protocol designator will appear in the "preview" when you mouse over the selection.
• Any attached images will NOT preview even if they're included in the first comment in a selection. If you want attached images to preview, then add the images to some publicly accessible site then copy and paste that link. (Google Drive, Dropbox or photo storage sites can be useful for this.)

If you have any questions, let us know. You'll be helping us improve these articles for everyone. Just reach out to support@ponga.com or via the chat window.