| Photo Galleries |
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In the Gallery sub-menu on the left, you'll find some of my photographs. Over time I've swapped around with different methods of presenting them on the web from manually edited web pages, through to the fancy flash-based system you see here. On a couple of other sites I've set up multi-user photo gallery packages as well like the one for AMSAT-UK. The two that I play around with the most for my own stuff are PhotoFolio (PF:) and SimpleViewer (SV:). I have used Lightroom from Adobe whilst it was available as a free beta, so there is a single instance of a gallery produced with that.
I have a 'wrapper' application for SimpleViewer called 'iPhoto Export' which despite the name will export from a simple directory of image files. With a bit of commandline scripting or use of Automator on the Mac, it is relatively simple to generate the directory structure required by SimpleViewer or PhotoFolio. Just recently, I updated my copy of Adobe Lightroom and have been playing around with that. To save having two (or more) copies of my photo libraries, I've exported the whole lot out of Aperture back to their master format and then reconfigured Aperture to use the images from an external directory and just keep the previews/metafiles in the Aperture library. This way, I can use the same source images in Lightroom as well, in the same way. I added a few export plugins to Lightroom from 'The Turning Gate' website to allow Lightroom to export to SimpleViewer galleries and a novel AutoIndexing facility called 'ShadowBox'. You can see what it looks like by clicking the 'TTG: ShadowBox' button. I tweaked the SimpleViewer thumbnails to pad them as square 100x100 pixel images so that they show up more evenly in the output galleries. Using the photo library in this way, I sent a copy of it across to a Linux system and used the library with 'F-Spot'. F-Spot isn't a patch on either Aperture or Lightroom, but considering that its freely available on most Linux systems which itself is free then F-Spot is a very useful package. No doubt that future releases of F-Spot will be a lot better. Resources: |
On my Mac laptop (A 1.67GHz PowerBook G4), I have been using Aperture (AP:) from Apple and am quite pleased with it as a DAM (Digital Asset Management) package. The built-in gallery features of Aperture are a bit limited, but many third-party plugins are available to export to almost every gallery package. I have one called 'Flash Album Exporter' that will export directly as a SimpleViewer gallery.