Publishing to the Garden

The Garden is where a story goes to be read: standard.garden. Reveal publishes a story there as a note, with its photos, in one step. Nothing in Reveal depends on it. Cull, develop and export all work without ever connecting.

Connect an account

The account row sits at the bottom of the sidebar. Click it.

• Connect via browser opens standard.garden in your browser. Sign in there and approve; the key comes back to Reveal by itself.
• Or paste an existing API key. On the Garden it is under Account → API Key. Press Connect: Reveal checks the key with the Garden before it keeps it.

Once connected, the row shows your username. Click it to see your plan and how many notes and views you have, and to Disconnect.

Reveal keeps the key in its own preferences file on your Mac (prefs.json, in the Application Support folder), not in the macOS Keychain. Disconnecting removes it. If you use the Obsidian Garden plugin, Reveal can fall back on the key that plugin stores in your vault when you have not connected here.

Without a connection, the Publish button simply does not appear.

Publish a story

A story is the folder’s note and the photos you picked; see Ratings and picks and Stories. In the Editorial tab of the sidebar, choose a Theme (see Themes), then press Publish to Garden.

Reveal goes through the picked photos one by one, with progress under the button:

1. Prepares each photo. It uses a JPEG that already sits beside the original (name.preview.jpg or name.jpg), or the developed preview it has cached, or else develops the photo with its recipe at 2048 pixels on the long edge, without the white border.
2. Uploads it. Uploads are content-addressed: if the Garden already holds those exact bytes, Reveal does not send them again.
3. Writes the note. Your note is sent with each ![[name.jpg]] replaced by the photo’s address on the Garden.

The first time, the note is created. Its title comes from title: in the note’s frontmatter, or else the folder’s name.

Two things Reveal writes on your Mac in the process, so that you are not surprised by them:

• A name.jpg next to each picked original, if there was none or if it differs from what was uploaded.
• In the story’s note, a garden-url: line pointing to the live page, and publish: true if it was missing.

Your originals are not touched.

Update a note that is already live

Publishing again does not make a second copy. Before it writes anything, Reveal looks for the note on the Garden, trying in turn:

1. a permalink: or slug: in the story’s frontmatter,
2. the address stamped in garden-url: the last time,
3. the folder’s name, simplified into a slug.

If it finds the note at any of them, it updates that one, even if you have renamed the folder since. If it finds nothing, it creates a new note at the first.

When a story is already live, the button reads Update on Garden instead of Publish, and the right-click menu offers Update collection instead of Publish collection.

View the page

When a story is live, a Live on Garden line appears under the button. Click it to open the page in your browser. The right-click menu has Open on the web. After a publish, a short published ✓ or updated ✓ confirms it, and the line appears.

A single photo

A photo can also be published alone, as a one-picture note: from the Export tab of the develop panel, with an option to allow the full-resolution download. See Export.

If it fails

A message says what happened (errors are shown as Error: followed by the reason). The most common cause is a key that has expired or was revoked: disconnect and connect again. A story with no picked photos has nothing to publish and says so.