In Progress

There's been a few feature requests in the few days since LRB Exhibition was launched. I'm glad to say it's getting good reaction. Anyhow, here's the list of stuff that have been added/fixed/changed since release based on user feature requests.

1.1 changelog

Added Top Gap

Added Numbers checkbox

Added body image check box.

Fixed repeat

Changed less for fewer

Change UI colours

Added a Switch to the galleries to hide the menu and force all images into Gallery 1, acting as a single gallery rather than a website.

Added Number Height slider

Added Menu Gap slider

Menu gallery swap

Menu and Identity Plate transparency choices

Added Flickr code and made icon.

I'm sure there will be quite a few more feature requests before 1.1 goes out, feel free to add them to the comments at the end of the LRB Exhibition post.

LRB Exhibition

Written from the ground up with new internal code and ideas, LRB Exhibition is a new 'Website in a gallery' plugin for Lightroom's Web module. From the Portfolio family, it allows the user to create home, about, contact and general use pages, along with 6 galleries and 2 external links.

The main image area in the gallery is based around a single image preview in an enclosed space. Using jQuery, each slide can be navigated to either using the navigation arrows, or numbered links to the relevant slide. LRB Exhibition is far more mature that LRB Portfolio was at version 1.0, in fact it's almost par with LRB Portfolio 2.51, and probably equal to 2.4. It does however have features not available to LRB Portfolio, such as per page image and text placement and a floating text box.

Install.

Mac: Double click on LRB_Exhibition.lrwebengine to install.
PC: In Lightroom Preferences (Edit>Preferences), click Presets. Click 'Show Lightroom Presets Folder'. Open the folder. Look for a folder called 'Web Galleries'. If it's not there, create it and drop LRB_Exhibition.lrwebengine inside it. Restart Lightroom


Intro Video.

Here's a quick look at using the gallery. Click through for the full size verion.



There will be more forthcoming.

Basics

A basic look at how this gallery works:
Create a collection of images you want on the website. Decide how many galleries you will have and then sort them into order for each gallery. You might have 35 images for the first gallery, 20 for the next and maybe 26 for the 3rd of the 3 galleries you've decided you'd like.
Next go to Web and select LRB Exhibition from the list. Make sure All Fimstrips Photos is selected in the Filmstrip, or that you've selected all the Photos. Go to the Gallery section and enter those numbers in each gallery section. Give the galleries names for the menu. Now go add details to the Home, About and Contact pages. Same for the Blank page, which can be used for pricing, or services etc. These page have individual text box sizes and locations, along with a choice of locations for the image on the page.

Once you've customised the gallery to your taste, be sure to save your settings as a Template. While Lightroom will remember the settings for the collection, if something bad happens, you're better off with a Template to get those settings back.

A lot of the internal stuff works in a similar way to LRB Portfolio, so you can access that User Guide for more details. Like I say, there will be more video tutorials to add usage.

Features

Home, About, Contact and Blank page

6 Galleries, 2 external links

Google Analytics support

SEO features built in

Custom jQuery Gallery

Multiparagraph, floating text boxes

Clean layout

900X600 images

W3C vaild (base code)

Sample Gallery
Click to view a sample gallery.


Buy
LRB Exhibition is €15 plus VAT.
For the first week of sales, you can get a 20% discount using the sales code LRBEX20. Remember to update the Cart after you enter the code, or it will not be applied. Please note the download allows for 9 updates, after which you require a new purchase.







The Future
Like any software, LRB Exhibition will take on a life of it's own in the wild. Feel free to ask questions or add suggestions in the comments.

LRB Portfolio 2.51 update available.

LRB Portfolio has now been updated to version 2.51. This update has substantial under the hood changes to overcome the way Lightroom generates CSS. Now when you export (or Preview in Browser), LRB Portfolio creates a new CSS file from internal settings, but based on a template CSS file. It's taken a while to get it right.

In addition there are some new features:

A Text Width slider that allows the user to set the width of the text in the Home, About, Contact and Blank pages.
An ID Plate Offset Slider that allows the user to nudge the ID Plate for better alignment
The non Gallery pages now use a separate header file to prevent an error in IE.
The code is now W3C valid. For the record, it's possible to have useless valid code, but as some people are bothered by this, it's done.
Fixed an IE bug where the ID plate could be hidden by the menu.

There are a few other bits and pieces changed, but mostly internal stuff. This was particularly hard work, with not a lot to show for it on the surface, but it was all still needed.

New customers can purchase the plugin from the LRB Portfolio Website. Current users can get the plugin from their download link, which they were encouraged to save on purchase. Support is available at the Lightroom Forums LRB Portfolio thread.


Update: Just pushed out 2.51 with layout fixes for the mail.html file page, which had orphaned CSS. I hate it when stuff like that happens.

LRB Portfolio video

I've created a short video covering how to set up images for the LRB Portfolio galleries, along with showing how to create a gallery index page. Make sure you watch this in HD to see things better.

LRB Portfolio updated to 2.4

Normally updates to LRB Portfolio are monthly, but this time I've had 2 code setbacks, meaning I had to go back twice and restart the update. I'm currently trialing a versioning system to prevent this from happening in the future. Mixed with a lot of other commitments, including new plugins and galleries, it's been tough to get this one out there. Hopefully I haven't introduced other bugs in the process of fixing the ones here.

Fixed issue where the menu offset could force the gallery to the right with Cmotion in Safari.

Fixed IE issue where there would be a gap at the bottom of images. (further work may be needed)

Changed Contact form so you no longer need to edit mail.html to get the correct email address)

There are other minor changes, but these are the main ones.

As with all updates, these are free to current 1.x & 2.X users of LRB Portfolio via the download link they received on purchase. New customers interested in buying this plugin can do from from the LRB Portfolio Website.

The updated User Guide is with the plugin, but can also be downloaded from the website.

LRB Portfolio 2.13 now available

LRB Portfolio has been updated to 2.13. Bug fixes include live update issues, facebook linking. New features include Twitter/Facebook/MySpace buttons, and the ability to remove the Cmotion ‘End of Gallery’ message. I've also added a 'Pinks & Purples' sample template.

New users can purchase from the above link, while current users can obtain the current version from their download link.

Interim Fix for Facebook link in LRB Portfolio.

I've been aware that there is an issue with the Facebook link in the Contact section of LRB Portfolio. I thought it was due to the '?' in the profile address. As it turns out it was much simpler and much more my fault. The fix is very easy, so while I've already fixed it for a future update, you can easily fix it yourself. This will save one of the precious downloads. If in doubt, backup the gallery first.

1. Open Preferences.
2. In the Presets Tab, click 'Show Lightroom Presets Folder'.
3. This opens an Explorer/Finder Window.
4. Open the Folder 'Web Galleries'
5. Look for LRB_Portfolio.lrwebengine.
5. On Mac, right (or control) click on this and choose 'Show Package Contents. For PC users this is just an ordinary folder.
6. Locate the file contact.html and open it in a text editor (NOT a word processor).
7. Around line 90, search for Facbook and change it to Facebook.
8. Save the file and restart Lightroom.

Aternatively, the exported contact.html (or whatever you named it) will show <a href="nil">, replace the nil with the correct link.

LRB Portfolio 2.12 update now available

I've updated LRB Portfolio to 2.12. As with all other versions, this is available at your download link. To update, redownload the file.
This is a bugfix release with the following fixes:

• Fixed a Firefox issue where it puts borders around the menu images when images were selected.
• Deleted an erroneous file called " head.html", which was being read as "head.html" on PC.
• Fixed a bug which broke the new charset options

For more info about LRB Portfolio, check out the LRB Portfolio Website.

LRB Portfolio Update to 2.11

I've just posted LRB Portfolio v2.11 to e-junkie.

This is mostly a bug fix version.

Gallery 6 link fixed
IE issue with normal gallery fixed (I can only confirm this for IE7, so if IE8 users have issues, please let me know)
IE8 Google CSS code is now optional. The code is supposed to fix IE8 CSS issues. There is one IE8 bug that could affect the normal (not Cmotion) scroll gallery.
I accidently left out the option to change the Contact Page Name and URL in the 2.1 UI change. This is now back in.
Added Auto Scroll, Keep Scrolling on Mouse Out and End of Gallery controls to the Cmotion section.
Em.. I can't remember the rest. In the 3-4 weeks since the last version, there's been bits added as I go.

I'm in the process of building a HTML version of my own website with this.

Current users can access the update via the download link they received on purchase. New customers are reminded to keep this link safe.

Just in Time Debugger

As the headcount reaches 3 on this subject, it's time to have a chat about this.

The Just in Time Debugger causes havoc with lots of programs on PC.. So it isn't just that you can get error messages with LRB Portfolio, Sonar, Mcafee, Filezilla are affected as well.

The 2nd from top link in Google comes to the rescue here though, or at least it did for 2 of those that reported it! The other one still has to get back to me!
The link is http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsdebug/thread/a52eb0ae-bcd8-4043-9661-d5fc3aa5167c/

And the bit that works is:

Solution

Open Start>Control Panels>Internet Options: Advanced and activate (check box)

* Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)
* Disable Script Debuggung (Other)


The post itself is a wonderful tale of hate for the JIT debugger, so those with this issue can get sympathy from me!
Why does it happen? Well I believe it's because Lightroom for Windows use Internet Explorer to preview inside Web, and the IS is throwing the errors.

YAU: Yet another update. LRB Portfolio up to version 2.1

The 24 minute long video demonstrating Version 2.1 of LRB Portfolio, has resolution in the form of an update to LRB Portfolio.
Since the video was created I've added a few small changes: Twitter, Facebook and MySpace contact options, along with a user field. I've also changes the code to allow those using Windows Servers to see their images! These servers block access to folders called bin, and the default image folder for Lightroom is called... bin.
Compared to Version 2.0, there is a massive UI change in this version.
Finally: You can have however many images you like in any gallery. Yep.. the slider is gone and you deal with it on a gallery by gallery basis. The only catch is you HAVE to use consecutive galleries.
To Download, please use your Download link if you are a current user, you know, the one that was emailed to you when you bought and were told to keep safe? Yes that one. New customers can purchase from the LRB Portfolio website.

Please direct support questions to the support thread.

LRB Portfolio 2.0 released

In the midst of all the current madness going on in the country around me, I'm pleased to announce that LRB Portfolio 2.0 has been released and is available to buy now. Users of older versions can use their download link to get the new version.
A new website is now online for the product: http://lrbportfolio.com/. The site will be the most up to date place to look for news on LRB Portfolio.

Changes

Changed charset to UTF-16 to allow for further languages

Fixed Content Area font size issues by adding a Content Font Size control

Added image choice to Menu

Added provisional code to allow Google Analytics code to be pasted:WARNING, each gallery loading will open the Google Analytics code in a browser window. This is how Lightroom deals with external resources and cannot be prevented. If you don't like this, then leave the Insert Analytics Code box unticked.

Added IE8 conditional code

Added an image choice to the mail page

Change the Page title on the mail page to whatever is in the Page Title

Addition of the Dynamic Drive scroll script and making the internal script options available in the Output Settings panel.

Added on text editing for home, about and blank pages

added a body width option

Fixed float issues with images dropping down.

Go to LRB Portfolio Website.

Take it to a vote: new feature ideas for LRB Portfolio.

Folks,
If you are an LRB Portfolio user, you may know that I've a ton of new features in the current beta version. It's looking pretty good, if I say so myself.

So while I'm changing things, I want feedback on some potential features:


I'm thinking of tying the height of the about, contact and home pages to the image+border height. This is happening by default, but if I do this, I can add a scrolling control to the page allowing you to add a lot more text, which can be scrolled through.

Add an avatar image to the About page to allow you to add a photo of yourself. I'd simply have a logo called ava.jpg that you replace your image with.

Add a single blank page with the same features of About, so you can choose the image, the name of the page etc.

Change the Menu Font-Variant to a list and leave it on normal by default. I'm seeing too many galleries with this left set!

I'm also considering a new section to the site: A featured website page. I've been peeking at a few sites to see what you're up to, so I wonder if other users would like to see them too!



Finally, before you start jamming up the comments with other requests, here's the so far list on LRB Portfolio 1.2beta

1.2 Changed charset to UTF-16 to allow for further languages
Fixed Content Area font size issues by adding a Content Font Size control
Added images choice to Menu: You can now use an image instead of text in the menu
Added provisional code to allow Google Analytics code to be pasted:WARNING, each gallery loading will open the Google Analytics code in a browser window. This is how Lightroom deals with external resources and cannot be prevented. If you don't like this, then leave the Insert Analytics Code box unticked.
Added IE8 conditional code (this is Google beta code and I may drop this)
Added an image choice to the mail page
Change the Page title on the mail page to whatever is in the Page Title
Addition of the Dynamic Drive scroll script and making the internal script options available in the Output Settings panel.
Added the ability to name the gallery1.html page to anything you like (as long as it ends in .html or .htm). The engine will automatically generate the page with the new name and find it correctly (go me, I didn't think this could be done).

It's pretty feature laden.... almost a 2.0 feature laden release. But if I do jump a version, it'll still be the same link for current users when it becomes available.

LRB QuickSlide

LRB QuickSlide is a basic Flash slideshow gallery for Lightroom. It generates a 620X400 flash SWF in a blank index page that you can then add to another page. Handy for quick galleries and things like Myspace pages etc. Based on some of the code from the not yet released LRB Flash Gallery, there is very little to change in this gallery bar the Flash background colour and the page background colour.

To add the code from this gallery simply copy everything between (and including) <object> and </object> to the new page. Keep the gallery structure intact and you'll be away.

This is free, but includes a link page to my shop page. I will put a donationware version of this online soon, minus the logo and link.
Also on the page is a little icon of slides. Clicking this will stop the slideshow running. Clicking of the left side of the image will go back one photo and on the right will go forward one. The slideshow loops, as will any clicking.

Maybe when I learn to use Flashvars, I'll be able to add things like slideshow timings and borders, but it the meantime, this is it!

Note: Because Lightroom uses Explorer as the plugin preview browser on PC, it cannot load other plugins like Flash, therefore this does not Preview on PC. Sorry, but I have to use HTML to map to XML here for the gallery, and I can't do it any other way (as in, it's not in my skill set). If you comment that you can't preview it on PC, I won't approve the comment, because I've already mentioned it. (Cue loads of comments on PC vs Mac that won't get by either). When you export an SWF in Flash, it allows either local or network access, so you have to preview online. I'm not trying to alienate users here! Really!

Download | Sample Gallery | Installation Instructions

Update: Using XML to create the Speed slider as suggested by John Beardsworth, I've now updated to version 1.01 which has a speed slider from 2-10 secs. Also I moved the slideshow icon to prevent it hiding the watermark. Download 1.01

LRB Portfolio updated to 1.1

LRB Portfolio, the website in a gallery plugin for Lightroom has been updated to version 1.1. New features include an error page for galleries lacking enough images, body font settings and background image control. Bug fixes include an issue with mail.php generation in 1.03. Current users can get the update through the download email they received with product purchase. If you have mislaid this, it went to your paypal email address. If you've used up all the downloads, reply with the download email and I'll reset it.

LRB Portfolio updated to 1.02

This just adds 2 external links and a test.php to the web engine. It's only a very minor update, so you don't need to redownload unless you are using all 6 galleries and need further links. If you want it and have used the 5 downloads, reply using the download email and I'll reset it.

LRB Portfolio updated to 1.01

LRB Portfolio has been updated to 1.01, fixing a width issue with the menu under IE, and changing the right click code to be compatible with WebKit based browsers like Safari and Chrome.
Additions include longer text fields for Home and About, a HTML Metadata Keywords box, Remove home page link, and a slider to set the distance from the top of the broswer. To avoid confusion with those seeing errors with not enough images selected, the Home, About and Contact pages show image 1. You will see the error on gallery pages with not enough images selected. I've added titles to each section for clarity.

Known Issues. On Mac, entering a number directly in the Image Per Gallery silder box doesn't force an update. Click on the slider to force the update. Using the Slider, or hovering over the number and dragging work as normal. I'm in touch with Adobe engineers to see why this code isn't working as normal.

To update, simply use the link you received on purchase to download the new version. Most of you have only one or 2 downloads, so you still have plenty left. Reply with the download link email if you run into trouble.

Creating your own web gallery..

While I did start with the first post on creating a web gallery here, I've decided that Lightroom-News.com is better place for it.
So here's the links to get you going:

Introduction

The galleryInfo.lrweb file

The manifest.lrweb and HTML file

Head down into 1.01

Since the release of LRB Portfolio, you might think I had a break after the development time? Well no actually. It was straight into 1.01 bug fixing and feature requests. The main bug was the menu going over too far in IE, but that's now fixed. There was also some instant update issues with some of the menu items. I replaced the variable to solve that. Images Per Gallery had a px after it. Now removed.
As to features, I've a basic Flash music player added. I also made a little music loop in Reason to demo it. Because it's Flash, it won't preview on PC in Lua galleries. That's an IE limitation due to the way it handles plugins like flash. It does show with Preview in Browser though.
Other feature requests done are: Option to remove the Home page link. Done, but you have to start on the home page.
Page Title: you can have a different title on the title bar, rather than Site title, which is used on the main page.
Logo Top Gap: Those worried that the gallery was too far down now have the option of setting this height from 0-200px (default is still 100px).
.
In Site Info I've added headers to each section for clarity.
My latest is in the hands of testers and the file will be updated when all the new bugs introduced with the features are sorted out. Previous purchasers will be able to redownload. Those that used up the quota can email in for a refill.
I don't have a time on this, because I don't know what they might find!


Update 4/9/08: I'm putting the music player on hold to get out a dot releases with more important fixes and cleanup. The music code requires the use of a) flash and b) frames, neither of which are previewing for me in XP. I've mentioned the Flash issue above, but the frames issue is a little more subtle and requires more thought..
Testers will get a drop shortly and hopefully give the okay.. Sorry it has to be this way, or you'd only be complaining more if it was broken!

LRG Complete 3.0 out of Beta

Joe Capra has announced the release of LRG Complete 3.0 final. The website gallery with Digital Delivery via Paypal is out of beta.
"We are happy to announce the release of LRG Complete 3 as a final version! Well final in that its not Beta anymore. I will no longer support any previous versions of the LRG Complete template so EVERYONE should upgrade to this new version. Please delete any previous versions of this template from your Lightroom installation and install the current version. Your user presets should remain the same and can be applied to this new version, however, there are some new settings in this new version so you will need to save a new preset to include the new settings."

Go to Lightroom Galleries to read about it.

LRB HScroll Web for Lightroom 2.0

Stemming from the original Hscroll gallery that I published on Lightroom-Blog, I sat down and pondered about how one would go about the creation of an entire website from within Lightroom. In truth it’s not easy to do, but with a simple amount of preplanning and a fixed number of images per gallery, I’ve implemented a way to do it. Obviously this is a version 1.0 gallery, and I’ve already started to consider how to improve it further, but as Lightroom 2 has just been released, it’s time to get this out there. (Just to clarify I mean this is version 1 of this gallery, but it's for Lightroom 2 as it uses new features only available in LIghtroom 2-if there is enough interest, I could remove these and rewrite the photoSizes code).
Obviously doing this takes time, so if you find this useful, please use the Donate button on Lightroom-Blog.com. Being on the net and using bandwidth isn’t free, so anything that comes back will help offset this cost!(I'll also send on a version of the gallery minus the LRB link!)

HSW needs some basic preparation. First decide the number of images you want in a gallery to show your work. In portfolio terms 20 is huge, so it makes a good number to start with. Set the Images per Gallery slider in Appearance to 20. Next decide on the number of galleries and use the tick boxes to select that number. If you select 6 with 20 imags each, you then need 120 images in a collection to create the website. Use the collection to sort the images into the order you want them in on the website. Remember to work each set in the Images per gallery number.

If you see this, it's because you didn't read the section above and don't have enough images selected. Images per gallery X Number of galleries= The required number of images.

Use the Site info section to name the galleries, and set the text on each page. You can also change the names that appear in the menu itself. I recommend leaving the .html files as is, unless you want to specifically rename them yourself.
HSW assumes you will use a minimum of 3 galleries. If you use less it will break currently (due to the way images are assigned to the Home, About and Contact pages). I'm considering a random script that will show a random photo on the home, about and contact pages.
This is also the first time I've created a basic Readme, so go easy on me. As well as leaving comments, I've started at thread over at Lightroom Forums.

Download | Sample | Install Instructions | Readme PDF

Creating Web galleries: Calling a colour directly in a gallery

I'm in the middle of a standalone flash slideshow/gallery (different than the LRB XML Flash gallery!) and came across an issue which corresponds to both galleries.
Basically to make the Flash more effective I needed to be able to change the background colour of the flash. This is defined in the flash call in the HTML normally. The OBJECT code uses param name="bgcolor" value="#000000", with EMBED using bgcolor="#000000". So I just drop in a nonCSS variable to call the Web colour? Wrong.. Or so I found out.

If I define my variable in the galleryInfo.lrweb file
["nonCSS.flashBG"] = "#000000",

And then call it in my HTML using either
$model.nonCSS.flashBG
or
<%= model.nonCSS.flashBG %>

I don't get the colour appearing. I get AgColor(0,0,0,1). Now 99% of my learning coding came from looking at other galleries, but I hadn't seen a way to do the conversion from Lightroom to Web colour (or at least noticed it!). Fortunately Andy Rahn suggested using AgColorToWebColor( nonCSS.flashBG ). Now it was a bit cryptic, because it didn't tell me how to call it. Was it a string? or a quote? Eventually between digging and trying everything (literally), I came up with the answer.

There is probably a shorter way, but here's what I did:
galleryInfo.lrweb: In the model section I define 2 variables:
["nonCSS.flashBG"] = "#000000",
["nonCSS.flash.bg"] = function() return string.format( "%s", AgColorToWebColor( nonCSS.flashBG ) ) end,

In my HTML I call nonCSS.flash.bg
OBJECT
param name="bgcolor" value="<%= model.nonCSS.flash.bg %>"
EMBED
bgcolor="<%= model.nonCSS.flash.bg %>"

To give me control over colour in the Gallery itself, I define a colour chip in the colorPalette section of views:

WPGPanelUI.label_and_color_row {
bindingValue = "nonCSS.flashBG",
title = "Flash Background Colour",
},

Hopefully this will help some of you with getting on with creating your own galleries. I intend doing a series of posts creating galleries from scratch for Lightroom News soon. I did eventually find examples of where this is used inside the default HTML gallery, but didn't understand what was happening with it until Andy sent me in the right direction.

Web Gallery production and other news.

Lightroom-Blog has been quiet recently. Trust me it's not intentional. I'm actually very busy with Lightroom related things, along with actually working!

I've gone as far as I can with the Flash Gallery I mentioned before and I'll be releasing it when I get time to write a quick readme/instructions for it. I will probably supply a logo free version file for those making donations(and then asking-helps with the mind reading!).

I'm updating HScroll to Version 2.0 at the moment. It's mostly ready, but I'm awaiting the V2 release so I can add any new gallery features that might appear.

When I initially created the menu system for both Scroll galleries, it was to ease creation of a website for users, something not possible with Lightroom default galleries. Both Matthew Campagna and Joe Capra took the menu idea a step further in the meantime with Pages and LRG Complete. Not to be outdone, I've created a single page that creates a whole website with a home page, about page, contact page and 3 galleries with 20 photos in each. There is a full menu system. This is also awaiting a V2.0 release, but I could drop code to make it 1.4 compatible easily. You can see an example of this gallery in action here.
The contact page uses a PHP form rather than a straight email address. I wrote this myself to prevent 3rd party licensing issues with scripts. I may include this in the standard HScroll gallery also. The final version of this website gallery will also have a few nifty features, so I'll probably be accepting donations for this, as it was a lot of work.
Please leave comments here, letting me know what you think. The contact form in the sample is not connected, I don't want mail from it!

I'm also very busy with rewriting sections of my Lightroom book for GMC pubs. I had it mostly finished when V2 loomed on the horizon, so I'm now hastily rewriting old sections, while adding in new things, such as Local Corrections. This is a basic book, under commission from GMC, but it does contain more advanced tips also. More details will follow as I'm allowed to release them!

During the waiting period I also started a potential eBook on creating web galleries. It's about 2/3rds done, but on hold for now. I'll get back to it after the Lightroom book is done. It's not a full sized book, so I don't think it will make the print phase at any stage.

I'll be doing more speedlink posts also, just to keep up activity here!

Gallery Resources

So you want a list of the available Galleries for Lightroom? Here's the ones that I'm aware of. I've added my current ones at the end.

If you have made some, please feel free to add them in the comments and I'll add them to the list.

The Turning Gate

HTML Galleries

• TTG Client Response Gallery


• TTG HTML Gallery


• TTG Panic Gallery


• TTG Rounded Gallery


• TTG Selection Gallery


• TTG Shadowbox Gallery


• TTG Slimbox Gallery


• TTG Smooth Gallery
  

Flash Galleries

• TTG AutoViewer Gallery


• TTG FlashNifties Gallery


• TTG GridNav Gallery


• TTG MonoSlideshow Gallery


• TTG Photo Stack Gallery


• TTG photoFlow Gallery


• TTG Polaroid Gallery


• TTG PostcardViewer Gallery


• TTG SimpleViewer Gallery
  

Gallery Indexes

• TTG XML Album Index


• TTG XML Auto Index


• TTG XML Shadowbox Auto Index


• TTG XML Shadowbox Index
  

Special Purpose Templates

• TTG LR Pages


• TTG Stage


• TTG XML Maker
  

Lightroom Galleries

• LRG VertiScroller


• LRG Complete - 1.1.1


• LRG FSS Select v1.1


• LRG FlashSlideStrip with PayPal - v1.2.1


• LRG One with PayPal Shopping Cart


• LRG Flash SlideStrip V2.0


• LRG FlashFlex


• LRG FlashScroller


• LRG User Comments v1.0


• LRG FlashBox v1.0

SlideShowPro

• SlideShowPro for Lightroom

Lightroom Blog

• LRB Flash Gallery Beta


• LRB Filenamer


• LRB FrogJS


• LRB Horizontal Scroll Lua


• LRB Vertical Scroll Lua

Too Many Galleries

Sheesh.. I have more Web Galleries than templates these days.... I really need to delete some! And update others! Especially my own. I'm so busy with book writing that it's taking a lot of my time, in fact, nearly all of my spare time. Anyhow I thought you might get a laugh out of my list, especially as there is way more than this available:

Sneak Preview: Lightroom Blog Flash Gallery

I was inspired by the Flash Gallery Beta gallery that I posted about a few days ago. With the hard work of figuring out how to make Lightroom write the XML done (I'm still thanking Matthew for directions!), I figured that maybe I should actually write my own SWF. I've never done much in Flash and 30 days is a short time to get to know it, but I managed to get my website up and going, along with creating the gallery I'm about to show you.

LRB XML Flash Sample Gallery

Features so far:

Full rather than cropped thumbnails

Slideshow

Click on the left of the photo to go back, click on the right to go forward.

Title and Caption information.

Vertical images are centred, unlike Flash Gallery Beta

Scrolling thumbnails

Toggle the thumbnail bar on and off


Things to look into:

Transitions look better in the Lightroom Preview, even with a fast connection Added a cross fade. Not 100% sure on the code, but it seems to be working.

Option for cropped thumbnails Happy with centered full thumbs.

Full Screen Mode

Drop Shadows on the thumbnail bar and main slide Done

Flyout with Collection Name and Description

Like I said, feedback is appreciated. And yes I'm aware I need to go back and edit the captions for typos!

Flash Gallery Beta for Lightroom

Flash Gallery Beta is a project by an anonymous developer. It looks cool, but hasn't been updated recently. I do really like how it looks, despite the faults (the main one being it doesn't center vertical images). It uses an XML file to get the images, so I thought this would be a good project to get to grips with creating XML from Lightroom. Boy, was I ever right.

Lightroom only allows one AddGridPage, which is where the photos get created and assigned in the Grid. I'm not using a grid for this, but I still need the images created. The trick was to create a dummy page and then have the real page with the flash file rename to index.html. I also had a little help from Matthew Campagna with the XML creation. I was on the right track, but Matthew gave me the right turnoff, directing me to his XML Shadowbox Index.

This version for Lightroom is quite basic. It has Background Colour control, Jpeg Quality, Identity Plate and Copyright Watermark support. I've no access to the .FLA file so I've no control over the gallery features. The swf file weighs in at 11k so it's tiny! Other features are a full screen mode and thumbnail scrolling.

Download | Install Instructions | Sample Gallery

Warning: Due to the way Lightroom handles Flash in HTML galleries, this will preview on a Mac, but may not preview on a PC. Finally, the crop ratio inside the gallery is 4X3, so you may want to crop to this to fill the gallery screen. Enjoy.
Update: I've justed added a Page Title Control and the About Menu.

Listing your filenames.

On the U2U forums a user was looking for a way of listing files in a collection. Someone suggested using LRTransporter, but in the meantime I created a Web Gallery that does just that. You could actually edit the Image Info and list anything you wanted about a file. Anyhow the gallery is here and Install instructions are here.

FrogJS Web Gallery

I've about oh... 5 or 6 different galleries on the go in development. Just fitting different ideas in and trying to learn more advanced CSS and more javascript. Here's a basic translation of the FrogJS Gallery created by Eric Puidokas for you to play with.

The internal scripts mess around with the Lightroom live_update.js, so stuff doesn't live update. For that reason, I've removed a lot of control from it.

If you do want to mess about with it, feel free. To force a refresh, untick and then retick Title or Caption in Image Info. Sorry it has to be that way, but while I've studied basic Javascript, this is beyond me!

Download | Sample Gallery | Install Instructions

This is not intended to be anything special, just an exercise for myself, but if you are interested in hacking together your own gallery, there's enough information inside the gallery and the FrogJS page to see how it all fits together..

For once, this is as is and is unsupported. Enjoy.

Horizontal Scroll Lua V1.0

Well, with the introduction of the new VScroll in the past few days, I've knuckled down into getting my original Horizontal Scroll gallery into Lua and with more control. While Lua Galleries are a whole new learning curve after busting through XSLT, they're very powerful. An understanding of CSS can lead to have a great deal of control in the gallery settings. Building the galleries is not overly difficult. It's very logical, but time consuming as you've no true debugger and it's a game of "will Lightroom ignore the gallery", because there's a missing comma somewhere. Enough of the gallery building talk.

HScrollLua 1.0 is a horizontal scrolling gallery. It's a single page gallery with all the image appearing on one page. No thumbnails, just the preview sized photos.
Features:

Single Page Scrolling Gallery

6 Menu items, one for contact info, the others are customisable from the Right Panel

All important colours are changeable

ID Plate can be positioned anywhere in the header (side to side control)

A border can be applied to a photo, with selectable size and colour

Free

Download

View a Sample Gallery

To install the gallery, you need to go to User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom, (On XP got o C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom -Note that Application Data is a hidden folder, on Vista C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\ ) where User is the name you log in with. Look for a folder called Web Galleries within. If it's not there, create it yourself. Unzip the file into this folder and restart Lightroom.
The new Gallery will apppear in the Right Hand Panel, in the Galleries Pane.

I recommend that you create an alias/shortcut to this Lightroom folder for future use.

Vertical Scroll Gallery: Update to v0.1.2

I've been thinking that with my 3rd Party Developer badge at Lightroom Forums, I should really do some updates on the Galleries I created ages ago. So I have. It's not like I've received much in the way of support requests or anything, but I have added the most requested: separate width and height. I'm also doing it directly rather than the non.CSS way Matthew Campanga uses. I did in the past, but for some reason I got it working fine using agmSizes. As to why it worked this time, I have no clue. Matthew is a far superior gallery coder, though, but my method uses similar ideas, i.e. mapping to intermediate variables. If you want to discuss more about coding galleries, mention it in the comments. We might persuade Ian Farlow of Lightroom Forums to open a forum for us.



Gallery features:

5 editable menu links, with internal commenting to allow more,
Vertical scrolling,
Photo Border with Colour,
ID Plate support, with sizing,
Copyright Watermark support,
Almost every colour editable,
Free..

Did I say Free?

I did this as a Lightroom Birthday present. I'm running out the door right now to work, but I'll add a sample gallery and more detail later! back in and adding more information!

To install the gallery, you need to go to User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom, (On XP got o C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Lightroom -Note that Application Data is a hidden folder, on Vista C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\ ) where User is the name you log in with. Look for a folder called Web Galleries within. If it's not there, create it yourself. Unzip the file into this folder and restart Lightroom.
The new Gallery will apppear in the Right Hand Panel, in the Galleries Pane.

I recommend that you create an alias/shortcut to this Lightroom folder for future use.



Download the UPDATED 0.1.2 gallery
View a sample Gallery
Download the template for the sample gallery (and photo at the top!). To install, unzip the file. In Lightroom, in the Web module, Right click on a Preset and choose 'Import.." from the menu. Choose the unzipped file.


Notes: The ID plate should be 300px wide for best results, but there is a logo height and width control to help if it's bigger.
While I have dotted borders around the menu and the scroll area, you can hide these by making the border colour the same as the background.
You can add a photo border with selectable size and colour.
Most of the colours can be changed.
The Add Copyright Watermark tickbox does work, but you''ll need to click the Quality control to force a refresh. This is the same in the Lightroom HTML gallery.
The Scroll CSS uses a code that is not supported in all browsers. It does tend to break gracefully, by ignoring the code and allowing you to scroll the page instead.

TTG XML Album Index 1.0 released

Matthew Campagna has announced a replacement for the TTG Gallery Index over at Lightroom Galleries.

"TTG XML Album Index is a new album indexing template for the Lightroom Web module, and replaces the newly discontinued TTG Gallery Index.

Through a combination of PHP and XML, the album index is easier than ever to update with new web galleries. It’s no longer necessary to regenerate and re-upload the entire index for every update, as was the case with TTG Gallery Index. TTG XML Album Index gathers album information from a simple XML file. To add a gallery to your index, you need only provide a thumbnail image and four pieces of information — thumbnail path, gallery path, gallery title and description — to the XML file.

TTG XML Album Index is written in Lua. It requires Lightroom 1.3 or higher, and a web server running PHP. Updates require an FTP client and a text-editor. Coding experience is not necessary.

TTG XML Album Index outputs valid XHTML and CSS."

VScroll Lua gallery

As promised, here's a version 1.3 Gallery for Lightroom. It's by no means a feature complete gallery, but it should be useful to those looking to build their own. It is a working gallery though, but still pay attention to the fact that it is a 0.1 release. It contains a similar menu system to the older XSLT Not so Simple Scroll gallery.

Download

Sample Gallery

This gallery uses .lrwebengine file extension when unzipped. Mac users can double click on the file to automatically install it. You see the following dialogs during the process:



On XP go to C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Lightroom -Note that Application Data is a hidden folder, on Vista C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\ ) where User is the name you log in with. Look for a folder called Web Galleries within. If it's not there, create it yourself. Unzip the file into this folder and restart Lightroom.
The new Gallery will apppear in the Right Hand Panel, in the Galleries Pane.

Gallery Notes: This gallery uses the CSS overflow-x and overflow-y tags. Safari 2 does not support these and while not beautiful, it fails gracefully enough that the images remain visible. I can't test on IE6 or IE7, so comments are graciously received. Because the tag is new enough it fails badly on IE5 Mac. There's a silly border issue on the ID plate, that I forgot to fix on Firefox (it took longer to write about than to fix), but it's fine other than that.

Calling a CSS file: the XSLT way.

I said in my last post that I would show how to call CSS in our gallery. Normally when we call a CSS file we would use the standard call tag:

<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" type="text/css" href="mycss.css" />

As per my last post, note the trailing '/' which closes the link tag.

This seems to work fine as a call inside transformer.xslt on mac but causes issues on PC. Therefore we need a correct way to call our file that works on both. Here's some sample code from the 'RollOver' gallery I've working (not completed yet-I still can't get the first image preloaded!). This part shows the initial calls defining the Paths and the then head section, where I use <xsl:call-template name="addCSSLink"> to call the code to add the CSS link.


<!-- Generate an index page -->
<xsl:template name="index.html" >
<xsl:param name="pathToRoot" select="''"/>
<xsl:param name="pathToContent" select="'content/'"/>

<file name="index.html">
<html>
<head>
<title><xsl:value-of select="$siteTitle" /></title>
<style type="text/css">
</style>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript" src="rollover.js">
</script>
<xsl:call-template name="addCSSLink">
<xsl:with-param name="pathToRoot" select="$pathToRoot"/>
<xsl:with-param name="pathToContent" select="$pathToContent"/>
</xsl:call-template>

</head>

The <script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript" src="rollover.js"></script> is just there to call the javascript for this particular gallery and not needed for the CSS call. I've left it in for completeness in relation to the gallery I'm doing this call on.

The xsl:template that is being called to make this happen is below:

<xsl:template name="addCSSLink">
<xsl:param name="pathToRoot"/>
<xsl:param name="pathToContent"/>
<xsl:param name="size"/>
<xsl:param name="masterCSS" select="concat( $pathToRoot, 'scrollextra.css' )"/>
<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$masterCSS}"/>
</xsl:template>

You place this code below the </xsl:template> of the 'index.html' template call and above the </xsl:stylesheet> at the end of the file. The call to 'scrollextra.css' is simply the filename of the CSS I'm using in this gallery.
Again hope this helps.

Adding external files to your HTML gallery

If you've been trying to create your own galleries based on the Andy Rahn (Lightroom Web Module engineer) tutorial on John Nack's blog, I hope you've taken note of the new file locations that Andy mentions in his Lightroom Journal Post. You have a simple page that shows a thumbnail of all the images, but now you'd like to put a bit of shape on it.

You could simply add CSS inside the 'index.html' file call in your transformer.xslt, but this can be cumbersome once we scale to multiple pages. An external CSS file would be better. Obviously the Web Gallery needs to both see and copy the CSS file to the created gallery. So how do we do this?

It's all done using an additional file called gallery.xml. Create a blank txt file and save it as 'gallery.xml' and paste the following into it and save it beside 'galleryMaker.xml'.

<gallery>
<amgVersion>0.5</amgVersion>

</gallery>

That's our basic gallery.xml file. To call files from it we use the <filePath> tag. Please note one very important thing about XML/XSLT: You must close all tags. Even <br> must be written <br />. The '/' acts as a close tag.
UpdatePaddlefish has noted in the comments that IE 6 gets confused by this and details a workaround there.

To include our CSS file we call it like this:

<filePath>mycssfile.css</filePath>

In our file this looks like:

<gallery>
<amgVersion>0.5</amgVersion>
<filePath>mycssfile.css</filePath>

</gallery>


If we include background url's in our CSS file, we need to include them in the gallery folder and in gallery.xml, eg


<gallery>
<amgVersion>0.5</amgVersion>
<filePath>mycssfile.css</filePath>
<filePath>background.jpg</filePath>
</gallery>


You can also save the files in subfolders to keep it tidy and call them from subfolders. eg:


<filePath>images/background.jpg</filePath>

would call the jpg from the images subfolder. These subfolders are relative to the current folder. On Mac it is possible to call the CSS file directly in the transformer.xslt file, but John Beardsworth pointed out this does not work for him on PC. While related to how to call a file, It's merely a matter of pasting code, cookbook style, and I'll just make it a post on its own. Watch this space.
Hopefully this will be helpful to those building from scratch and thanks to Andy Rahn for the original tip when I was calling files that were already online.

Scroll Extra

Still messing around with XSLT/XML and HTML galleries in Lightroom.
Here's an extension gallery that uses Andy Rahns info in this blog post. Read the original article and use the new locations mentioned also. What I've added is a scrolling mechanism in CSS and made it a little prettier using snippets of code from around the net. Scrolling uses overflow in CSS, while using LI to control the look of the nav bar buttons comes from a variation on the Listmatic site.

I've created a single page scrolling gallery mostly to avoid grid coding/preview pages and pagination (areas I need to study more first). It uses ID plate/Watermarking and Jpeg Quality. I have the JPG quality at 70, but moving the slider appears to do nothing. These last features are cut and paste code from the Lightroom HTML gallery, used in a 'cookbook' form, so I may have missed something essential.

Things of note:
The background files to the page, the ID Plate and the Nav buttons are included in the gallery.xml file using the 'filePath' command. As is the CSS file.
You can, if you want to, hard code links to files on the internet, but on a Mac Lightroom will open them in a browser when you first run the web gallery. John Beardsworth says this doesn't happen on PC.

The nav bar in the gallery can have its links edited in transformer.xslt. I plan to work on code to do this inside Lightroom at some stage.
I've been up all night messing with this so I should crash before work ;)

Antarctica: Ian Lyons

Ian Lyons is just back from Antarctica:
"I've just returned from a photo shoot in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica with the best part of 7000 images to sort, edit, etc through. Rather than wait for this exercise to be completed and since the site hasn't been updated in a couple of months I have put together a quick and dirty Adobe Lightroom Flash Gallery that contains a small sample of the type of subject matter captured. Places visited included the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, South Orkney and the Antarctic Peninsula."