Adding Images to Events

How It Works

Each image in a TimeStory document is attached to an event. When you select the image or event, you will see a dashed line connecting them. (Multiple images can be attached to a single event.)

You can freely drag an image around, and TimeStory records its position relative to the event. For point events, this positioning is relative to the event’s center; for span events, it will be relative to its start, midpoint, or end, whichever is closest. When you drag or resize the event, change the time scale, or edit the event’s dates, the image moves along with your changes, to keep that relative positioning.

When you filter out an event, or collapse or hide its containing section, any images attached to it will disappear as well.

Adding Images from Files or Photos Library

Select the target event and choose “Attach Photo” or “Attach Image from File” from the context menu or from the TimeStory application menu under Events on iPad. This will bring up the Photos library or a file picker; you can import any PNG, JPEG, or other common image format.

Adding Images from the Clipboard

You can copy an image file in the Files, copy an image from your Web browser, or copy image data from any other image-viewing app (such as Preview) and paste it directly into TimeStory.

You must have exactly one event selected, so TimeStory knows where to attach the image. Just use the normal Paste context menu.

Providing Image Metadata

Each image is associated with three optional metadata (informational) fields, editable in the Inspector.

• Summary can be used to give a text description of the image. This text appears in a tooltip if you hover over the image.
• Source is meant to capture the origin of the image. For example, you might put the Web address (URL) of the site from which you got the image, or the name of a book from which you scanned it, or, for a photo, the name of the person who took it.
• Copyright is meant to capture any credits or usage-rights information associated with the image. Historical timelines, in particular, often contain images from various copyrighted sources, and this lets you preserve that information within the document itself.

If you select an image and open its Details view by selecting Details in the context menu or under the TimeStory menu View on iPad, that view will contain the summary text and the title of the associated event.

Connector Lines and Image Borders

If you want, you can add a couple of kinds of decorations to an image:

• A border around the image
• A connector line between the image and the event it’s attached to

You can choose the styles of these two lines independently. You can also set a specific line color; by default, these lines have Automatic color, which, as elsewhere, chooses a light or dark color based on the document background.

Together, these line styles and colors make up the style of the image, so you can use default styles and style copy/paste to keep your images consistent; see Applying Consistent Styling for details.

How Images are Stored

When you add an image, your TimeStory document will store a copy of the image. This means that you can send, sync, or copy your TimeStory file anywhere, without needing to bring along a separate image file. (This also means that your document will grow in size to hold the image data; for a file with many images, this may be something to be aware of.)

If you add the same image multiple times, for example to stamp different events with the same decoration, TimeStory only adds one copy to your document.

Copying and Pasting Images from Within Documents

Once an image has been added to a document, you can also select it and use regular Cut, Copy, and Paste commands to attach it to other events or to paste it into another app.