New in Basecamp 3: Image Galleries

At Basecamp, we write a lot—from announcements to pitches, and everything in between.

Quite often, we’re presenting something that has a Before and After, like a mockup or interface design that’s been revised. Until now, this was always kind of frustrating. Basecamp only supported full-width images, so it could be difficult to quickly compare two images at once.

Today we’ve added support for side-by-side image galleries inside written posts!

This is a subtle but substantial change: galleries support and enhance your writing by making it more fluid, expressive, and precise. They’re great for sharing screenshots, comparisons, mockups, sketches, photos, and so on.

Here’s how it works.

Creating a Gallery

In any rich text field in Basecamp 3, you can make a gallery of images by uploading multiple images at the same time. You can do that in the file-browser dialog, or by dragging and dropping files into Basecamp directly.

Dragging images to make a gallery

When you do that, Basecamp will automatically group the images together in a nice arrangement. There are a few different layouts based on the number of images you’ve posted together.

If you upload two images at once, they’ll be oriented side by side.

If you upload three images at once, they’ll be shown 3-up in a row.

If you upload four images at once, you get a 2×2 grid.

And then finally, if you upload 5 or more images, they’ll be arranged in 3-up-sized rows.

You can also make a gallery by uploading images one by one. Just upload one image, then immediately upload another. Basecamp will notice that the images are directly adjacent and bundle them for you.

Adjusting a Gallery

If you don’t want the gallery layout, you can split it up by putting your cursor between images and hitting return. That will break up the gallery at that spot and resize things accordingly.

If you prefer a different arrangement (for example, maybe the second image should be first) you can drag and drop them to reorder.

You can also drag and drop images outside of galleries into galleries, and vice-versa.

It all works like you’d expect images in a text editor to work!

Related Changes

New toolbar for images

Clicking on attachments in Basecamp’s text editor has changed a bit. You’ll now see a balloon at the top that shows the file name, size, and the trash button. (Formerly this was just a trash button.)

New attachment toolbar

A more prominent caption field

Did you know you can write custom captions for any image you upload in Basecamp? If you didn’t, you’re not alone! This feature used to be rather hidden, but we coaxed it out of its hiding place.

Now just click on any image in the editor and you’ll see the Add a caption… field at the bottom. Click on that to type any caption you like.

This is a caption for the picture that shows adding a caption. 🌀

Popup menus on gallery images

Every image in a gallery has a small ••• menu adjacent to the caption. Click that and you’ll see a popup with the original file name and file size, plus links to download the image, or view it at full size.

Popup menu for details

That’s it!

Galleries work everywhere right now, in our mobile apps and on the desktop. We hope this update helps you create richer posts, and makes writing in Basecamp a little more enjoyable. Let us know how you like it!

New to Basecamp? Head on over to basecamp.com and see what it’s all about.


New in Basecamp 3: Image Galleries was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.