On occasion, I'm sent SharePoint questions which don't require any research on my part because I actually already know the answer. Granted, this still doesn't happen often, but it has been known to happen. At first blush, I thought the following question was going to be one of those:
How can you uncheck your pictures without finding each one individually?
To edit a picture, check it, then Actions/Edit. However, if you finish editing, you apparently MUST uncheck the picture, or it stays in your Picture/Edit bucket.
I found out the hard way when I deleted an uploaded photo because it was the wrong one, and all of a sudden, my employee homepage was missing several pictures! Turned out they were still checked, and Actions/Delete moves all of them to the recycle bin.
Any global uncheck available for pictures?
There is indeed a global uncheck feature available for images in a Picture library, but there's a catch, and it's one I've encountered myself. The catch is that in order to access the "select all" functionality, the view on your Picture library must be set to Details. What's tricky about this, and what makes it something of an Easter egg, is that the default view for a Picture library is Thumbnails. Neither the default Thumbnails view or the Filmstrip view offer the "select all" functionality which will allow for a global checking or unchecking of the contents of your library ... but if you switch the view to show Details, like so...:
Presto, you now have a "select all" button at the top of the left-hand column (just beneath the New button):
And now we come to the thorny part of the question, the notion of checked/edited items in a Picture library remaining checked. This is indeed the case, but the potential danger of this behavior hadn't dawned on me prior to receiving the email quoted above. Granted, the ability to globally uncheck all images in a library is certainly helpful in this instance, but since it requires a view which many not be one's customary view, and since it also requires remembering to go through the step of deselecting all images, it seems that there ought to be a better safeguard available. And so, it seems that I've got some investigating to do after all...
Posted
Sep 24 2009, 10:57 AM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.