Generated Galleries and Slideshows
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.
Editor and Workflow Shows
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 ...