Create A Web Gallery
Get your photos online
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| Photoshop's Web Photo Gallery feature automates the process |
Building A Web Gallery From Scratch
For the most flexibility and control over your web gallery, you'll want to learn some basic HTML and build your own pages. It's not as difficult as you might think, even if you're starting with no prior knowledge of computer code. In the example here, I've built a simple gallery of two pages-one with vertical images and one with horizontals. Each page has a clean design and simple navigation to get you from one page to another and to send me an e-mail.
Once you learn to build simple web pages like these, you'll have the basic skills you need to create much more sophisticated pages. It takes a lot more space than we have here to teach you these skills in the context of this article. So, we've put a step-by-step tutorial on our website at www.pcphotomag.com/build-a-website. There you can download all of the source files as well as easy-to-follow instructions that'll take you through the whole process.
To complete this tutorial, you'll need any image-processing program, as well as software to edit the HTML code. This can be done in something as simple as a text editor, but software like Adobe Dreamweaver will make it much easier.
Automatic Galleries With Photoshop & Aperture
If you're not ready to jump into writing your own HTML but you want to host your own site, you can create web galleries with your photo software. Many applications offer this capability. There also are plug-ins for Photoshop, such as Media Lab's SiteGrinder (www.medialab.com), which can help you make sophisticated websites from within Photoshop. For our purposes here, though, we'll stick to the basic gallery-creation features built in to Photoshop and Aperture.
Photoshop
In Photoshop, start by creating an empty folder on your desktop that'll eventually contain all of the files you'll upload to your web server. Call this folder anything you want. Create another folder and place in it all of the images you want to add to your gallery.
Launch Photoshop, and select File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery. This will launch a dialog box where you set up the gallery options. The first drop-down menu displays the styles of gallery templates available. I chose the default "Center Frame 1-Basic." In the e-mail box, type your e-mail address if you want a link on your gallery for people to send you mail; if not, leave this blank.
Next, select the folder where you placed the images for the gallery, then the destination folder for the gallery files (the folder you created on your desktop).
Finally, set the options for your site. You can change your site's name, info about you, fonts, the sizes of your images, color schemes, security and copyright settings and more. When you're satisfied, click OK.
That's all there is to it. Photoshop will now work a little magic behind the scenes, creating the HTML and files you'll need for your site, and will launch your default browser so you can preview your gallery. If you want to make changes, launch the Web Photo Gallery dialog again. If you're satisfied, all you have to do is upload the files in your desktop folder to the root folder of your website.
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