November 10, 2008
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.
October 19, 2008
In our previous installment we discussed adding Styles to our gallery, but discovered that we needed to restart Lightroom to see the changes. Now we look at automatic refreshing in Lightroom.
September 13, 2008
Continuing from our last post about creating your own Web Galleries for Lightroom, we now tackle adding Styles to our gallery.
Probably the easiest way to get a look going in your gallery is to simply add some CSS code. In the <head> section of our HTML file, simply add a <style> tagset and enter CSS info.
<style>
body{background-color:#000000;}
<:/style>
That will give you a black background. You could also place the body section in a text file and call it. Create a blank text file and call it gallery.css. Enter body{background-color:#000000;} into it and save it in the folder with the other files. Instead of the <style tag, we now need to use a link tag. In the <head> section: <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”gallery.css” />. Now even though we done this correctly, Lightroom also needs to be told we’ve added a new file to the gallery. This is done in the manifest.lrweb file and uses a new command.
September 5, 2008
Welcome to Part 3 of our introduction to creating Web Engines for Lightroom 2. We’ve looked at the galleryInfo.lrweb file, so now we need to look at the other 2 files we need to make a gallery, the manifest.lrweb file and a HTML file.
Manifest
As the name might indicate, the manifest.lrweb file tells lightroom what files we need to make the gallery. Here we map template files to real files, and keep resources to help with our gallery, such as CSS and Javascript files. Here’s a very basic manifest.lrweb file:
importTags( "lr", "com.adobe.lightroom.default" )
AddGridPages {
template='grid.html',
rows=5,
columns=3,
}
August 29, 2008
This is the second post in an ongoing series where I take you through the creation of a basic web gallery in Lightroom.
As mentioned in the opening post, galleryInfo.lrweb is the heart of the gallery. It’s what gives us the look of the panels and the controls that are accessed by our HTML file. For my editing I use TextWrangler or Taco HTML Edit, depending on whether I’m looking at code, or copying and pasting between files. TextWrangler has coloured highlighting for Lua code, which is very handy. Of course any text editor will do. So let’s start from scratch with a superbly basic file.
August 27, 2008
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:
June 22, 2008
With browser makers starting to see the light about colour management, we can finally see our colours as intended online. Safari has been doing this forever, but now Firefox 3 is colour managed. Except, it’s not on by default. So here’s how to do it.
In the address bar of Firefox, type in about:config.
Scroll down to gfx.color_management.enabled. By default it’s set to false. Double click on it to change it to true. Restart Firefox. Viola.
Version 3 is much faster, which of course is another bonus. Your Lightroom galleries and exports will now look better online.