Adding Images to Events

Placing and Moving Images

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.

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 with View ▸ Show Details, that view will contain the summary text and the title of the associated event.

When pasting an image from the Web, or from a file, TimeStory attempts to infer as much of this as possible; for example, the website’s address will go into the Source field, and a Web image usually has alternative text, which goes into Summary.

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.

Adding Images from Files

Select the target event and choose Events ▸ Attach Image to Event. This will bring up 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 Finder, 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 command.

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.