User guide — all chapters
Adding media to a post
Media goes in the body, where you put it. Put the cursor where you want a photo and add it. The composer shows it in place as you write, and the published page puts it exactly there.
| How | What it does |
|---|---|
| Media | Opens your photo library: up to ten photos or videos at a time. On iPhone and iPad the same button offers Drawing…. |
| Audio | Record… to record in the app, or Choose File… to bring in an audio file. |
| Drag | Drag photos, videos or audio into the post and they land where you drop them. On the Mac, drag from Finder or Photos. On iPhone and iPad, drag from another app. |
| Paste | Paste a photo you have copied. |
| Share | Send photos to Selfish from another app’s Share menu. See Capture. |
A photo, video or audio clip moves and selects like any character in the text. Deleting that character only takes away its place: the file stays attached, and shows at the top of the post until you give it one. To take it out of the post, tap it and choose Remove.
What happens on the way in
Everything you add is prepared for the web once, when it comes in. That is deliberate. It protects your storage and, more to the point, your privacy.
| Kind | What Selfish does |
|---|---|
| Photos | Scaled to fit within 1920 pixels and saved as JPEG. They are rebuilt from the pixels alone, so location and every other detail recorded in the file are stripped. The coordinates of your kitchen don’t ship with the picture of your dinner. The camera’s settings are read first and kept with the photo, only so that you can choose to show them. |
| Video | Converted to H.264 MP4, which every browser plays, set up to start playing before it has finished downloading, with location and timestamps removed. Selfish asks the quality once for each clip: High (1080p) or Standard (720p). Neither enlarges a smaller video. |
| Audio | Always saved as .m4a with its tags removed. An AAC file is re-packaged without being re-encoded, so nothing is lost. MP3, WAV and other formats are converted to AAC so browsers can play them. |
If a file can’t be converted, it isn’t attached. Selfish never falls back to the original, because the original would keep its location.
Your originals are untouched in your photo library. The copy in Selfish is the one that has been resized and cleaned.
Describe it: alt text and captions
Tap a photo, video or audio clip in the post to open its details.
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Alt Text | A description read aloud by screen readers in place of the image, and shown if it can’t load. Worth writing for every photo. |
| Caption | Optional. A line shown beneath the item on the published page. |
The site check on the publish screen lists photos with no description, so none slips through unnoticed. A caption counts if there is no alt text.
With VoiceOver, each photo, video and audio clip is also an action on the text, such as “Edit photo 2”, so its details can be reached without aiming a tap at it.
Photos side by side
Tap a photo and turn on Beside the photo above. The two sit side by side, in the editor and on your site, where the row is set at one height. Add more for a longer row. Phones show two to a row.
Crop and rotate
Tap a photo, then Crop and Rotate…. Turn it left or right, choose a shape (Free, Square, 4:3, 3:2 or 16:9) or drag the corners.
Every edit starts from the photo as you added it. Selfish keeps that copy on your devices, never on your site, so Revert to Original always works (once the original has arrived from iCloud, if the edit was made on another device). Only photos you have edited take the extra space.
Camera details and a focal point
Two more things live in a photo’s details.
- Show camera details puts a line under the photo: the camera, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed and ISO, as read when you added it. Where the photo was taken is never kept, so it can never be shown.
- Focal point. Tap the photo’s subject. Where your theme crops a photo to a square, on your home page and archives, it keeps that part in view.
The index thumbnail
A post can have one photo that represents it on your home page and archives. Choose it under Index Thumbnail in Details, or tap a photo in the post and turn on Use as index thumbnail.
| Theme | What the thumbnail does |
|---|---|
| Default, Classic, Mono, Editorial | Shown beside the post in the list. With none chosen, no image is shown. |
| Modern, Zine | Used on the post’s card in place of its first photo. |
| Sky | Placed first among the post’s photos. |
Every theme also uses it as the post’s picture in link previews.
The thumbnail can be a photo that isn’t in the post at all. Add one with the + tile in Details. It appears only in the listing and in link previews. On the Mac you can drop a photo straight onto the thumbnail tiles.
Video
A published video shows the frame you see in the editor as its poster, and it keeps its shape while the page loads, so the page doesn’t jump. A reader’s browser fetches only the video’s details until they play it.
Audio, and recording it
Audio → Record… opens a small recorder. Tap to record, tap to stop, listen back, record again if you like, and then Add to Post. The microphone is used only while you are recording, and the recording is cleaned of its details like any audio you bring in.
A post with audio can also be an episode of a podcast. See Readers, feeds and links.
Drawing
On iPhone and iPad, Media → Drawing… opens a blank page to draw on with Apple Pencil or a finger. Add Drawing puts the sketch into the post as a picture.
Link cards
Put a link on a line of its own, then open Details → Link Cards and turn on the switch. The link is shown as a card with the linked page’s title, description and picture.
Selfish reads that page once, at the moment you ask, and keeps the card with your post. Your published page loads nothing from the other site, so the card can’t track your readers and doesn’t break if the other site changes. In the Markdown and in exports, it stays a plain link.
A post from each photo
In a site’s ⋯ menu (Site Actions on the Mac), Posts from Photos… lets you pick photos and makes drafts from them: One Post with All of them, or A Post for Each, dated the day its photo was taken. Every photo loses its location on the way in, as always.
Photos on the published site
Selfish does a few things so photos load quickly for your readers.
- Every photo carries its size, so the page doesn’t shift as it loads.
- Photos further down a page load as the reader scrolls to them. The first one loads at once.
- With Site Settings → Site → Photos → Smaller copies for phones on, each photo wider than that is also published 640 and 1280 pixels wide, and phones and small windows download the size they need. Sites made with New Site start with it on.
The site check also flags any file over 10 MB, which is slow to upload and slow to load for a reader on a phone.