The easiest way to get your photos in the face of your fans is to use a tool that automatically generates a photo presentation given a group of photos. You can pick a gallery type of show—where the items are presented in thumbnails that can be clicked to expand the photo—or a slideshow, with the photos displayed either through a navigation bar or in a timed sequence.
There are applications that do nothing more than generate slideshows or galleries. However, some of the photo editors and workflow tools we use for our other work also provide these shows, though you may have to poke around to find them.
Most workflow tools provide a gallery or slideshow capability, but not all provide tools to generate a web-based gallery or show. Two that I looked at in Chapter 3, Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom, both support the ability to generate an external photo display, though in this regard I found Lightroom to have the simpler and more intuitive interface.
Selecting a group of photos and clicking on the Web tab in Lightroom is all you need to do to create a web photo display using all default settings, shown in Figure 4-25. Once in the web page, you can change the template, including whether the show will be HTML or Flash. You can also define some characteristics of the photo layout, as well as modify the color palette.
Aperture's gallery option is fairly simple to use, but you have to find it. Figure 4-26 shows Aperture opened to the Web Gallery option, which is a small icon among the other tasks, as noted by the yellow arrow. Once found, though, it's a simple interface, though not as powerful as Lightroom's. You can select a specific theme, and once that's picked, choose the layout of the thumbnails, including the number of columns and rows per page. To finish, change the show's metadata, including title, subtitle, copyright, and description. You can also pick what kind of metadata to show for each photo, such as the caption, keywords, EXIF data, and so on. Note, though, that it can get a bit messy if you print everything out. Once you're done, you can export the gallery pages to your local computer, or you can export them to Apple's .Mac hosting system.
Another feature about Aperture, whether good or not, is the tie-in between all of Apple's products, as demonstrated by the fact that you can export your gallery to .Mac. Aperture also ties into the AppleScript system within Mac OS X, which means you can add features such as a Publish to iPhone AppleScript (available at http://automator.us/aperture/iphone.html), which creates web pages fine-tuned specifically for iPhone. Of course, this begs the question of why you would want to generate a web gallery for only one device.
Returning to Lightroom, it's not surprising that Lightroom's web interface is so intuitive—Adobe shines when it comes to providing web gallery capabilities built into the company tools. Both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have excellent and easy-to-use web gallery options.
In Photoshop, web galleries and slideshows can be generated via the File → Automate menu option. Among the options you'll be given are those to create High Definition Resolution images (HDRs), batch merge, PDF presentations, and Web Photo Galleries. Clicking on the latter opens a dialog that lets you pick the type of show to generate (HTML or Flash-based templates), as well as fine-tune some of the options, such as color and show name, as shown in Figure 4-27.
None of these tools provides what Photoshop Elements 5.0 provides, though. Photoshop Elements has more ways to generate just about every type of photo show you could ever want, both for the Web and your desktop, than any other photo tool I've looked at. One of my favorite options allows me to create a movie of my photos, with music, to play on my HD widescreen TV attached to my computer. I can really review the photos and make that keep-or-not decision in style.
All the options are available from the Elements Organizer, under the Create menu. The options are numerous, but the one I'm interested in for this book is Photo Galleries, which opens the Photo Galleries Wizard, shown in Figure 4-28.
The Photo Galleries Wizard provides several different layouts for the thumbnails, including filmstrips along the top, bottom, and sides. Other options include the size of the thumbnails. In the bottom of the page, the Wizard provides style options for controlling the appearance of the gallery. I'm learning how to hand-bind books as a hobby, so the Hand Made Paper template was my favorite.
Photos are added in the left, and you can add them individually or select a whole folder. Once the photos are added and the template is just right, clicking the Next button takes you to the finishing steps where you can name the Gallery and define characteristics such as background music, slideshow duration, and some color and font control. (See Figure 4-29.)
You can preview the show before exporting to make sure it doesn't need any further tweaking. Once you're happy, you can export the file locally and share it via several options, including uploading the show with FTP to your web site.
There's a wealth of free or at least free-to-try tools that can create photo shows, with or without effects. Some of the generated shows are HTML-based, and some are Flash.
One popular platform-independent tool is the Java-based Gallery Constructor, available in installations for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I tried the Mac product.
Tip
Gallery Constructor can be downloaded at http://www.through-the-lens.net/cms/index.php?page=Gallery_Constructor. Installation instructions are provided for each environment.
One thing that sets Gallery Constructor apart from other gallery construction tools is support for RAW images. If you have a set of RAW images you want to quickly convert into a gallery without having to pre-process them first, this is the tool for you.
Once you open the tool for the first time, you can create a project just by accessing a specific folder. This triggers the tool to load thumbnails if any are provided for the images, as shown in Figure 4-30.
You'll then adjust the page template in the Gallery Template section, including providing a title and the number of thumbnails in the page. The Thumbnail Workflow tab provides options for controlling the appearance of the thumbnails, and the Image Workflow controls the display of the single, enlarged photo pages. You can also preview the image, and when you do, you're given options to change the photo's gamma, contrast, brightness, and saturation options, as shown in Figure 4-31. You can also run a Slideshow immediately, without having to generate a hard copy of the show.
Once you've tweaked the gallery options, you're ready to generate the show. You can generate a hard copy to your local machine and also FTP the show immediately. You're given the option to tweak each photo in turn or accept the same settings for the entire show. The only issue you might have is memory errors, but the site provides a workaround for this. Note, though, that it's not a fast application, especially if you're working with RAW images.
There is another gallery generator that adds an effect to the images, and can also work cross-platform, as well as with most of the tools I've covered in this chapter and Chapter 3—PostcardViewer.
PostcardViewer is a Flash show that also has a standalone tool, in addition to a PHP-script-based alternative you just drop into a folder full of images. I tried the PHP-based application with some images I had already loaded with my server.
To use the PHP application, you'll need to download the viewer, unzip the postcardviewer folder, and upload it and its contents to your server. Copy or move the photos you want to include to the images subdirectory. You'll also need to download and unzip the buildgallery.php application. Upload this file to the same postcardviewer folder. There are options you can set within the file, and the PostcardViewer site has documentation on each of these.
Tip
You can find the PostcardViewer application and instructions at http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/postcardviewer/.
In the postcardviewer folder is a file, imagedata.xml, that you need to make writable by everyone via the FTP program you use. It's this file that provides the information the application needs. You could also edit it yourself; it's just a listing of image names and some dimension information. Figure 4-32 shows the PostcardViewer after the show is first opened, and Figure 4-33 shows it with one of the images expanded.
There's a world of other gallery creation tools that work in all environments, in addition to Windows, Mac, and Linux. Ultimately, though, if you're going to be publishing a lot of photos online, you'll probably want to use a more dynamically managed system, such as full-featured gallery software.
Tip
One of the best places to get a listing of photo gallery generation applications is at About.com, at http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/webgallery/Web_Photo_Gallery_Creation_and_Automation_Tools.htm.
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