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.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=047NxVFRBqI]
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
- Compatible with Lightroom 2 and 3
- 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.
Is there a way to adjust the overall aspect ratio of the template? I shoot 6×7 and would like my images to properly fill the template without cropping the images.
Also, I only want one gallery, and I'd like it to load as the first page. In other words, when people go to my site, they would see the ID plate, the first image in the gallery, "About" and "Contact" at the bottom, and the right arrow key to advance to the next image. Is there anyway to make that happen with simple clicks or will I have to get inside and rewrite the HTML code?
Thanks,
Gary
Hi Paul,
Visited colours take preference over hover colours in CSS, Paul. That's standard CSS. Changing that would require another colour tile for a:visited:hover.
I'm sorry, it's the hover over the menu. http://photomara.com/exihibition
I am assuming that once a menu link has been clicked, that the hover color will be the same even after it becomes a visited color.My menu colors are set to: Link is white, Hover is red, Visited is blue and Active is green.
When I refresh my browser the visited link color remains in Firefox so it is difficult to assess whether they are set up correctly.
Thanks for looking into this.
Hi Paul,
I'm not sure what you mean, as there's more than on hover colour.
Do you mean the one on the gallery numbers?
Can you post a link?
Sean, the cursor hover color do not appear active on my site. I have it set to another color but once I have visited a gallery, there is no color change when I hover. Thanks
No worries Paul.
Luiz, use
to create a space in the text.
Sean, as has been my experience with LBR Portfolio; a bit of great support from you, with some valuable lessons learned the hard way about LR I now have a new website ready for launch http://photomara.com/exihibition .
Your advice about the banner was great and learning that gif is not supported in LR are things that I now have in my collective knowledge of LBR and LR. Thanks
Seam,
How do I add line break in text?
In about or blank page.
Thanks!
Hi Sam,
If you haven't restarted, your entries should still be stored by clicking on the arrows on the right of each field header.
What you describe is true of all Lightroom Galleries. If you select another one, Lightroom resets the previous one. That's just how Lightroom does it. This has nothing to do with the plugin, or any plugin for that matter.
I've stated the need to save Templates as you go and to update them as needed. There is no other saving mechanism in Lightroom for Web.
There's isn't much that can be done about this, I'm afraid.
Sean, I'm not happy. I just spent 3 hours designing my LRB website and accidentally clicked one of the other web plugins, when I got it to return to the LRB layout everything I had done was gone. Now I start over. What the heck? This sucks.
Hi Andreas, as Lightroom doesn't incorporate video import, that's not going to happen. Even if it did, I images that rendering down from 1080 would be time consuming everytime you wanted a change something. And that's not to mention that the SDK would have to support it too.
You'd honestly be better off just pasting the code in from youtube in the blank page for example. Just be warned that Lightroom opens external links in a browser every time you refresh something.
I've already posted most of the current fixes in another post.
Sean,
I was just thinking about the possibility to incorporate slideshows/stopmotion vids from LR3 or something similar to your cool timelapse video.
Can't wait to see what you have in 1.1
-Andreas
Hi Bob,
I'm just saying that I'm keen to have a nice way of having captions, so it leads to other options as well.
I've had very few comments back from testers, so I'm not quite ready to release 1.1 yet. Anything that comes back will be bug fixes, so it's as feature complete as it's going to get for now. Obviously there will be further updates. The very first request was for a slideshow option, so I'll be looking into that next, then captions.
Thanks for your reply. And don't get me wrong, I really appreciate all you've done to make the best web gallery plugin I've seen so far, by far.
I'm not a seller, I'm just looking for a way to identify an image. There is a lot to be said for not writing captions because a good image should stand alone without the need for a caption. Most captions, IMO, detract from images. I'm just faced with, insofar as my dog shots are concerned, differentiating between Rover and Spot.
Some people don't want to see the numbers. That's what the checkbox is for.
Tool tip can't happen, because the navigation arrows hide the image, so a tool tip simply wouldn't appear.
Writing plugins is only a tiny portion of what I do, and I've already put a lot of my time into the 1.1 update, so there won't be any caption related stuff going into it. Don't get me wrong, a caption method might lead to a way to add Buy buttons for images, but that's a ways off yet.
If it's any consolation Canon's DPP just got the ability to provide arbitrary rotation, for fixing horizons, and it's at version 3.8.
I'm looking forward to v1.1, since I'm already almost completely happy with v1.0. However, as we discussed early on, I do really want a way to identify what photo in a gallery one is looking at, ideally with a caption but at least by illuminating or otherwise emphasizing the image number.
When you say you have already incorporated in v1.1 "Added Numbers checkbox" is this what you mean?
Are you any closer to a captioning scheme that is acceptable to your design sensitivity, whether via an actual caption, a tooltip rollover-type, or otherwise?
Thanks,
–Bob
Hi Paul,
Background: This is actually in the comments already. Simply delete the text from the background image field and the colour from the color palette will be active. There'll be a tickbox in the next version.
Menu: The gallery position can be swapped in the version that's with testers, but that's about the height of the customisation of the menu. It's actually hard to incorporate major positional changes in the menu.
Sean, I want to use a black background and I don't know what to place in the field to indicate that. I'm sure once you tell me I'll say "oh, I knew that".
Also the menu places the external links before the galleries. LBR Portfolio puts the links on the end of the menu. Perhaps I missed something or is there a way to re-order the menu?
Great stuff, I'm jazzed that you're already seeing such great usability improvements in future iterations.
Paul
Sean,
It's perfect.
Thanks,
Andreas
Sean,
I just re-read the instructions, that's exactly it. I always overlook something that simple.
I'll give it a try in a few minutes.
-Andreas