Import Images

To import an image into your WebTV PageBuilder Scrapbook, simply click on the Import button, or on the image itself, and you will be prompted with a message asking if you want to add it to your Scrapbook. If you say yes, it will be added and you will be brought to your scrapbook (you can then use the Back button on your remote or keyboard to return to the image list).

Please note that the HTTP command used in the Import button is a WebTV-specific command, and this function will therefor only work on WebTV browsers. If you are visiting WebScissors on a PC or on a different brand internet terminal (such as AOLTV), the Import feature will not work.

Importing vs. Transloading

Since this question comes up rather often, it might as well be addressed here, so that the distinction between the two can be clear form the start.

On PCs, the term downloading refers to the act of moving a file (be it an image, sound clip, video, program, or any other type of computer file) from any external machine (usually over the internet) to your computer's hard drive. And uploading refers to the opposite: moving a file from your computer to another external computer or web server. WebTV users, of course, do not have a local hard drive that is accessible to them, so true downloading and uploading is not possible.

In the old days, that meant that WebTV users were not able to move files around at all, and had to have their PC-user friends do it for them whenever they needed it done. To solve this problem, Anthony Chu created a tool that would let a WebTV user enter the URL of a file they wanted to move, as well as the FTP information for the web server they wanted to move it to, and the tool would then download and upload the file on the user's behalf. He called this tool a Transloader, thus coining the term that has since come to refer to moving any file from one external machine to another external machine, using a third party script as a go-between. And transloaders have become an irreplaceable tool that WebTV users could hardly accomplish any web page building tasks without.

When WebTV Networks, Inc (WNI) released their PageBuilder feature in 1999, however, the terminology got a little more confusing. The WebTV PageBuilder provides a Scrapbook area, which gives each user account a certain amount of space on WebTV's web server, in which they can store images for their web pages. When WebTV eventually released the wtv-tricks:/add-to-scrapbook command to the public, it then became possible for anyone to provide a form on their web page that would move a given image file into the user's WebTV Scrapbook. [WebScissors was the first tool of this kind, as is explained in the History of WebScissors page that Jos' father maintains.]

The confusion sprang from the fact that the WebTV Scrapbook appears, form the user's perspective, to be part of their local WebTV, even though it is actually located on an external machine (the WNI servers). Since the Scrapbook is only accessible from the account on their WebTV receiver, many people referred to the process as downloading or uploading, which was inaccurate. And since traditional transloaders gave you the ability to move any type of file to any destination of your choice, while tools using the wtv-tricks:/add-to-scrapbook command only allowed you to move images, with the WebTv Scrapbook being the only destination, it was a bit misleading to refer to these tools as transloaders.

At present, the naming convention for these tools is still a bit up in the air. Most of the ones we've seen lately are calling themselves Scrapbook Uploaders. But in an effort to come up with a more accurate term that's easier to remember (and shorter to write), I've decided to use the term Import within WebScissors to refer to the process of using the wtv-tricks:/add-to-scrapbook command to move an image from an external web source to your WebTV Scrapbook.

Whether or not this terminology will eventually start to be used on other tools as well is unknown, and irrelevant. But at least you now know how the term is used within the context of WebScissors.