Category: Web

Web Gallery A-Go-Go

Rikk Flohr, photographer, trainer and Twin Cities Lightroom User Group member, recently presented “Building a PayPal Functional Web Gallery in Lightroom” using LightroomGalleries.com’s HTML and Flash PayPal galleries at the March UG event. He’s created a follow up article here for folks who couldn’t be at the event.

For photographers looking for a web gallery designed specifically for the the iPhone, Matthew Campagna from The Turning Gate released his TTG iPhone Portfolio Gallery.

Additionally, Matthew has set out to produce a series of tutorials walking users through their first Lightroom-produced website. His first article “An Introduction to FTP: Putting your stuff online” tries to demystify FTP for folks who find putting their work online a daunting task.

Christian Løverås, of Oslo, Norway, blogs about adding Google Analytics JavaScript to Lightroom HTML web template.

Finally, a round up of resources for creating your own gallery templates for use in Lightroom’s Web module:

Sean McCormack’s 5-part series on creating a Lightroom Gallery:

Anatomy of a HTML Gallery
The galleryInfo.lrweb file
The manifest.lrweb and html files
Adding styles
Live Update

While folks have been reverse engineering Lightroom’s web templates since the initial beta with some help from the LR team, the web engine functionality is now officially documented in Lightroom’s SDK.

Adobe and Default Browsers

In January, CNET ran an article titled “Time for vendors to stop foisting IE onto consumers” which asks “Why the hell do Adobe CS4 help and Lightroom geotag links launch Internet Explorer? It’s not even my secondary browser, much less default.”

According to Andy Rahn, an engineer on the Lightroom team, there is no bias toward which browser is invoked from Lightroom, we simply look to the operating system registry for what the user has defined as the default browser. That’s not to say this always works correctly. There may be issues with certain browsers registering with the operating system correctly as the default browser.

In a follow up with the individual who originally reported the problem on Twitter, it sounded like the issue may be specific to Google Chrome and the Vista 64-bit operating system. Google released an update yesterday that includes changes that include: “Fixed several problems with making Google Chrome the default browser on Windows Vista.”

If you’re experiencing applications not launching the correct browser, try setting the default browser manually.

[Update: Stephen Shankland posted an update: Adobe’s default-browser advice worked for me. Thanks to Stephen for working with us to track down this issue and post additional details. – JT]

Airtight Interactive Web Galleries

The authors of three excellent Flash-based web photo galleries, Airtight Interactive, have agreed to let us integrate with Lightroom!

Download Adobe Photoshop Lightgroom Web Gallery Templates for SimpleViewer, Postcard Viewer, and AutoViewer:

SimpleViewer : http://adobelightroom.com/galleries/airtight_simpleviewer.zip
PostcardViewer : http://adobelightroom.com/galleries/airtight_postcardviewer.zip
AutoViewer : http://adobelightroom.com/galleries/airtight_autoviewer.zip

Unzip the archives, and save them into the “Web Galleries” directory in your Lightroom settings folder:

  • Mac OS X : /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries
  • Windows XP : C:\Documents and Settings\[username]]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries
  • Windows Vista : C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries

Relaunch Lightroom. These should now be visible in the Web module. Enjoy!

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!

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