February 20, 2008
The Turning Gate Birthday Galleries
Matthew Campagna of The Turning Gate has created 2 new Lightroom Web Galleries as part of the 1st birthday celebration of the release of Version 1 of Lightroom.
Strictly speaking it’s one gallery and one gallery index.
Shadowbox Gallery
The gallery is a brand new one based on Shadowbox from Michaeal J. I. Jackson (resist Thriller pun). This is impressive in that it’s cross-browser, cross-platfrom, web standards compliant, and fully documented. The last part is as important as the rest, in order to make full use of the gallery! It works in the same way as the TTG Slimbox gallery, click on a thumbnail and the photo will open in a floating window above the gallery. Caption information and navigation control is included so you can go between full preview photos, without returning to thumbnail view. For the full details go to the TTG Shadowbox page. This gallery is the first compatible with the new XML Auto Index gallery.
XML Auto Index
The gallery index is the XML Auto Index. This will read your galleries and create a table of contents/index for the gallery. It requires PHP on your server, and must be run with Lightroom 1.3 or higher. This gallery requires a slight trick to get it going involving creating a fake gallery, but everything is explained well over on the XML Auto Index page. For this to work properly, you need a gallery created by the Shadowbox gallery (above). I’m sure Matthew will be adding more galleries to the compatibility list in time.
Matthew has made a significant contribution to the Lightroom community with his free web galleries. At last count there were 15 galleries and 2 index galleries. If the 2 new galleries don’t excite you, maybe some of the others might. If they are of use, you can leave a donation at the site.