Creating a web presentation

- The Adobe Output Module offers an excellent web module for generating websites quickly. These can be uploaded directly via FTP to your own sever and then provided to clients. Adobe offers several templates that are quite useful. Now there are a couple of gotchas in this workflow so let me walk you through it. You can select several images. Let's just go to the preview space here and if you'd like you can also drag those into a new order. So if I feel that the images are out of order it's pretty simple to rearrange them.

Let's put all of this Native American art together for example and move this space capsule shot up more towards the aeronautics section at the beginning. That's good, now I'll click web gallery. You'll see that there are several templates available. Some of these rely on flash others are simple HTML. If you want the broadest compatibility go with the HTML gallery and you'll see that there's just one style, Lightroom.

Let's go ahead and give this a name I'll call this Smithsonian and I'll put my name in and let's clear out the about this gallery. You can include any contact information in if you want people to be able to reach you as well as copyright status. Now you'll notice that you have the ability to adjust colors and make other choices, such as the number of columns and rows.

When you're ready you can click preview in browser to see what it's going to look like. Now you might get a local bug here when you try to run this where the images don't initially show up. This is a permissions based issue. Now you might get quite frustrated as you're working, because as you try to preview these different file types or take a look at the animation for the web page you'll notice that things don't appear to load. You actually haven't done anything wrong. It's just that a lot of people have tightened up the security for Adobe Flash, because it could be invoked to do bad things on a computer.

Let me walk you through how to modify the security settings so just your individual animations or web templates can be previewed on the local machine. Don't worry, if you upload these to a remote server they typically work, but I want to show you how invoke a preview on your local system. Now you're going to find that the preview in browser feature isn't going to likely work. So you're going to have to generate a gallery in order to see what's working here, but there are several styles that you can choose from.

I'm going to try this airtight viewer here, which is kind of nice, and at the bottom you're going to want to choose where this goes, so you can give this a name. Let's call this one Smithsonian and choose the location where you're going to store that. I put it in a folder on my desktop. You also can specify an upload location if you want to go direct via an FTP server. When you're ready click the save button and it will write the files that are needed.

Now you might run into a setting here where you want to add permission for flash so under your system preferences you might have to add a trusted location setting. You can click plus and navigate to that folder that you've created. I'm going to say that this gallery folder is to be trusted. Now when I launch that locally it'll work. Just choose file open and navigate to the folder. In it is an HTML gallery, just choose the index file and hit open, tell it that it's okay to run and now the webpage is generated.

In this case the postcard gallery is kind of cool. It lets you easily navigate around and see the images in a fun playful way and zoom back out. You want to try a different template that's simple. Let's try a simple slideshow here. I'll click save and let's just give it a new name so it doesn't overwrite the other one.

There it is. Back to my web browser and choose open, navigate to the index file, run it, and you'll get a good idea on what the gallery looks like. In this case we've got a great slideshow that the user can control and play back and the ability for them to even learn more about the gallery or to get in contact with you when they click.

Now if you take the time to add in your contact information you can even include email addresses so the user can get in touch with you and find out more. Now the Adobe web galleries are little bit tricky to get setup, but if you need this workflow once it's done it should continue to work and in the long run this is an excellent time saver.