March 2007 – Lightroom Journal

Lightroom Pre-Conference Session at Photoshop World

If you’re in the Boston area, or headed to Boston for Photoshop World next week, take a look at Ruth Knoll’s Photoshop Soup2Nuts Pre-Conference Session on Tuesday, April 3rd. This session will start at 1PM with a 2-hour Lightroom Workshop led by yours truly, followed by a panel discussion where you’ll get to hear an all-star panel discuss the new arrival of Lightroom v1.0. The panel consists of Andrew Rodney (moderator), Katrin Eismann, Shelly Katz, Thomas Knoll, Jeff Schewe and Mark Hamburg.

In addition to Mr. Knoll and Mr. Hamburg, several key members of the Lightroom team are expected to be present. This worthwhile afternoon will be a great way to kick off your PSW Conference on one of the hottest topics at the show.

Proceeds will honor the memory of Bruce Fraser, through a donation to the non-profit charity of the estate’s choice.

Check out the details at:

http://photoshopsoup2nuts.com/

Templates and Galleries

Some of you may have seen a post I put on John Nack’s blog a couple months ago about how Lightroom uses XML and XSLT to build an HTML template.

A few things changed in Lightroom between when I originally wrote that, and when we shipped 1.0. So it seems worthwhile to revisit that post and correct what’s changed. Most notably, we renamed some of the terms.

What used to be….	=>	…is now called
~~“Web Template”~~	=>	“Web Gallery”
~~“Preset Browser”~~	=>	“Template Browser”
~~“Preset”~~	=>	“Template”
~~“WebTemplates”~~	=>	“Web Galleries”

Also the folder to put new Web Galleries into has changed. On Mac, store them in <your home directory>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries/. On Windows, put the gallery in C:\Documents and Settings\arahn.MN-IAGO\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries.

In the next couple of posts, I plan to show how to build a simple flash-based gallery using Flash 8 and the ActionScript programming language. So stay tuned!

Adobe Connect “Online Party” for nearly 500 Lightroom Beta Testers

On Thursday, March 1st, The entire Lightroom team staged an “online launch party,” which was presented as a thank-you celebration for the 10,000+ users who participated in the forums during the year-long public beta.

The party was presented using Adobe Connect technology, and was a first for the new Adobe hosted service with nearly 500 testers from around the world logged in. The 90 minute presentation was given by Lightroom team members from San Jose, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle. VIP customers Jeff Schewe, Seth Resnick, Mikkel Aaland, Derrick Story and members of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals contributed to the photographs, slideshows, videos and demos presented to the testers. Special kudos go to Jennifer Stern and Jeff Schewe for organizing.

Jeff in his Antarctica outfit. Which worked in the Minnesota weather that day.

Teams in San Jose (left) and Minnesota (right) saying “thank you” to the public beta testers.

How do you upload to .MAC (dot Mac) from the Lightroom Web Module?

One of the Lightroom Beta testers asked how to upload a web photo gallery from Lightroom to Apple’s dot Mac hosting service. For this question, I assume you’re using a Mac — or else why would you have a dot Mac account? I’ve had good luck with this technique:

First, make sure you are connected to the internet and mount your iDisk in the Finder by choosing Go -> iDisk -> My iDisk. This will mount the storage space for your dot Mac website on your computer.

Next, switch to Lightroom and prepare your web gallery in the web module. Then choose Export… Click on your computer name and locate the iDisk (it has a globe icon and will be named with your dot mac account username). Then select the “Sites” folder on your iDisk. Type the name for the gallery (I recommend a single word, and no spaces) and click “Save”.

Lightroom will generate the web photo gallery and save it to your dot Mac website. When the “Save Web Photo Gallery” task finishes your photo gallery is live on your website. The URL will be “http:” plus “//homepage.mac.com/” plus your dot Mac username plus “/” plus the name for the gallery that you chose.

This is how I usually export web galleries to dot mac. For example, here are some pictures from a trip to see the ice on Lake Superior last month.

http://homepage.mac.com/arahn/duluth