We’re pleased to report that we rolled some more updates to the site this morning. We hope they will make your time on Footnote more pleasant and productive.
Updates to the site include:
- A completely revamped viewer
- More improvements to Your Gallery
- One small step in our progress toward a new search
The Viewer
The big change with this update is an overhaul of how the viewer works. We’ll post more detailed information soon, but the short version is that the viewer is now faster, smoother and can support much larger images.
In addition to the behind-the-scenes changes, we’ve added:
- the ability to connect images in the viewer and to see connections other users have made.
- the ability to share images you find. If you are an All-Access Member, you can share premium images and the folks you share with can see them for free.
- a find feature for images that have been indexed using optical character recognition (OCR).
- an option to save an image straight to a collection in Your Gallery.
The Gallery
You can now rearrange the images you add or upload to Your Gallery. To do this, simply click the “arrange” button and then drag and drop the images into the order you’d like. After you’ve arranged Your Gallery, you can always find recent additions to Your Gallery by sorting your images by the date you added them to Your Gallery and then return to “Your Arrangement” using the drop-down menu.
Search
We’re working hard to make searching Footnote easier. The first step, the one we took with this update, is to get the current search working on our new platform. You won’t notice too many changes just yet, but we have changed the default search to AND, so the search will now return results that include all the words you search. You’ll find updated search tips here.
There’s much more to come for search, but this first step will make it possible for us to get moving on the larger things we have in mind.
As always, we hope you’ll send us your comments and suggestions. If you’ll let us know what you want the site to do, we’ll do our best to make it work for you.
I just discovered this site and I really like the concept. Adding images was pretty easy. Adding annotations was not. Creating collections was not. Sorting and rearranging images was not. I find that regardless of the computer I am using, making annotations, rearranging images and creating collections fails 90% of the time. It would seem simple enough, on the surface. But the actual workings of the process are prone to more misses than hits. Drag and drop is more like Drag and lose. I can’t make collections work for me after quite some time spent trying. When annotating, be sure, users, that you place the box exactly on what you wish to annotate and resize it to enclose only that area.
I really am happy about the ability to see so many things, and I plan to make frequent use of this site. I merely want to bring these issues to someone’s attention. I have a lot of material that I wish to upload and share in an easily accessible manner, and at this rate it will take some considerable time to accomplish that goal given the problems I have encountered.
Thanks for your comments. I’m sorry to hear that you were having trouble with some of the features of the site.
Are you still seeing the problems adding annotations and arranging Your Gallery? If you are, please send us a message using the contact form at http://www.footnote.com/contact.php and we’ll see if we can figure out what is going on.
Before I subscribe please tell me what information I will find on this site relevant to US family history, ie, census/SS Death Index etc etc etc…thank you…Elly in Oz..
We have quite a few documents that could help with US family history research–naturalization documents, pension files, military service records, birth records, but which of these records will be most helpful will depend a lot on who you are looking for, what they did, where they lived and other details for their lives.
It’s always free to search or browse Footnote and we show all the index data and a preview of any image for free too, so the best way to find out if the site has anything that will be worth the price of the subscription is to:
Search the site here.
Or look through the list of titles here.
If you are interested you could even try the beta version of our upcoming advanced search here.