Everyone has been asking (well, no one, but you get the idea) what kind of tools I used to create the new website. Part one is and has been for a while, SlideShowPro. There are different versions, they have a standalone that creates web galleries from Lightroom, plus a standalone app if you don’t have Flash.
I used the Flash version to build a swf. You can customize nearly all aspects of the component, and it can show video and play sound as well. What I am using is a pretty stripped version paring down to the essentials. As far as complexity goes if you follow the instructions you can do it. Big-However, you have to be willing to stumble around and solve your own problems, hunt, google, etc. But the information is there.
The thumbgrid is a new addition also from the folks at Slideshowpro, and this adds the zooming thumbnails and also the mouseover navigation and tooltips. A nice touch is that no matter how you size the stage, the maximum number of thumbnails are calculated and fit for you. You have control over scaling of the zoom, scroll speed, spacing, etc.
None of this would be all that helpful if you couldn’t update the site yourself with new images. That is where Director comes in, and is the backend to SSP.
This is a screenshot of a webpage showing me logged into my Director page. I am hosting this on my own server, along with the images. You can also buy a Director package that includes image hosting, and possibly more importantly, includes maintenance upgrades and new features as they become available. You then tell Director to “serve” images to your website where the swf resides, and they are displayed. But Director will do more than this, it can serve images to any website or blog where your SSP swf or other javascript/Ajax generic slide show is running. This is how I am able to serve images to the page on my blog, iPhone, where a non-flash type slide show is visible and visible on iPhone. Essentially a parallel site.
What you see above is an Album view, and I can drag and drop images to reorder them. You can upload images, add captions, rotate and delete images also. Albums can be included in Galleries, and Galleries are what you are seeing as my top level, Work and Assignment. You can include and remove Albums from Galleries all from the web interface.
Finally there is Lightroom, and a plugin called Lightroom to SlideShowPro, which exports images from Lr to any Album directly using Lr’s FTP functionality.
This is the last link in the chain, and makes keeping the site up to date very easy. If you enter caption information in the metadata it can be included with the image in the upload and Director can display that also. About the only thing I can’t do is combine two images two-up like you can in LiveBooks. But there may be a way eventually. For now a sidetrip into Photoshop. (yes I have tried print to jpeg and the results are crap for some reason).
Could you get all this in a turn-key solution-yes-LB and aphotofolio will do pretty much all of this. But you have to like their designs and you have to like their pricing, which may or may not be for you. Freeway Pro was the wysiwyg web authoring program I used to design the site, it is not like Dreamweaver, it is more a layout program that generates code behind the scenes. It is easy to use. This code may or may not be editable by other programs like Dw. But that is not an issue for me.
Should I have been spending the time doing other thing, promoting, shooting new work, etc.-well, yes, but there are always things you should be doing. I got a lot of satisfaction (and a fair amount of aggravation) from doing it myself.
When my first website went up in 2001, there were few packaged solutions for professional photographers. So I had to do it myself. Now there are several, and some competition in price. Starting out now, as I said, I probably would not go the self-designed route, the choices are too easy you could say. But there is something about a custom designed site that communicates more about the photographer I hope, an approach, or approachability. That is what I am aiming for.