August 27, 2008
Anatomy of a Lightroom HTMl Gallery
Lightroom HTML galleries used to be written in a mix of XSLT and XML. The simpler coding in Lua makes it a pleasure to create HTML galleries with. You can write Flash galleries in Lua, but because IE doesn’t allow plugin loading on PC Lightroom, you can’t see them in the preview window. Hence 3rd party Flash galleries use the old method for cross platform compatibility.
Lua galleries were introduced in Version 1.3 and have matured somewhat with V2.0. The new syntax is much tidier and more compact. In fact Matthew Campagna shaved 500 lines off one of his galleries for version 2, and my new website in a gallery LRB Portfolio managed close to that also. Much kudos to Andy Rahn for this.
So what comprises a Lua Gallery? Well the absolute minimum a gallery can contain is 3 files: galleryInfo.lrweb, manifest.lrweb and a HTML file. Let’s look at them in a little more detail: