February 22, 2007
Photoshop Lightroom Flash Gallery Tips
Source: Bluefire Blog
Bluefire Blog have published a series of tips and tricks on how to customize Web template designs in Lightroom. Click on the links to go directly to the link pages to read more about each tip.
Customizing Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 Flash Galleries with XML
The controls within the Web tab allow you to customize the Lightroom Flash Gallery templates in a lot of ways. However, you can customize them much further by editing the XML files that are generated when you export a gallery. This requires almost no knowledge of Flash or HTML, and can be done with almost any text editor.
Add a background image
You can add a background image to a Flash Gallery generated by Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 by editing the “style.xml” file in an exported gallery (found inside the “..resources/styles” folder). The image will go behind everything else in the gallery including the Title Bar and Menu Bar (which fyi, you can set to be semi-transparent or “hidden” – covered in Tips and Tricks #2.) The background image will always fill the background of the entire gallery, so it will be “stretched” to fit any given browser window.
Hide or Modify Header Bar and Menu Bar
The Header Bar and/or Menu Bar in a Flash Gallery generated by Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 can be turned off (hidden) or made semi-transparent by editing the style.xml file within an exported gallery (found inside the “..resources/styles” folder). This is particularly handy if you have added a background image (covered in Tips and Tricks #1) or if you are putting a gallery into an existing web page (covered in Tips and Tricks #3) and you don’t want or need “headers” in the gallery itself.
Embedding a Flash gallery into a web page at a fixed size
When you export a Flash Gallery out of Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, it makes a web page for you (index.html) and on that page the gallery always scales to fit the browser window. That’s nice, but sometimes you want to put a gallery into your own web page with other content. If you do that, you may want to turn off the Header bar and Menu bar in the gallery itself (covered in Tips and tricks #2).
You may also want to “fix” the size of the gallery so that it does not auto-scale to fit the available space.
Changing Image and Thumbnail Borders
If you look closely at the various Flash Gallery templates in Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, you’ll notice some variations in the “look” of image and thumbnail borders (and the drop-shadows too) but if you look in the customization controls of the app, you’ll notice there is no way to change those on any given template. Here’s how to do that manually by editing values in the “style.xml” file (found inside the “..resources/styles” folder) of an exported Flash Gallery.