Photoshop Insider

Three New Cool Flash-Based Web Photo Galleries Adobe Snuck Into Lightroom

By Scott on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 6:08 am | updates.

In the last free update to Lightroom, Adobe did something very cool; they snuck in three very slick Flash-based web site templates (which are completely customizable), designed by the gang over at Airtight Interactive. In Lightroom, these three templates actually appear in the Gallery Panel on the right side, and they’re called:

Airtight Postcard Viewer (shown above top), which arranges your photos like they’re on a Light table, and when you click on any one, it zooms into a large size (seen in the image right below it). Click on either image to see larger versions.

Airtight Auto Viewer (shown above–click for larger version), which gives you a row of interactive panels, and the center panel displays your full color image while the panels on either side are dimmed back. People viewing your Web site have the choice of clicking the play button to watch an automated slideshow, or they use the arrows to scroll through the slides at their own pace.

Airtight Simple Viewer (above above top), displays your images as tidy square thumbnails on the left, and when you click on a thumbnail the larger version is displayed with a white Polaroid border around it.

What’s so cool about these (besides the way they look), is how incredibly customizable they are, and how easy they are to customize. There’s a panel (shown here) where you choose how many thumbnails, how large they are, if they have a border, and how wide it will be, and a dozen or so customizations specific to each template. It’s very, very well done.

Kudos to Airtight Interactive for such well thought out design and especially for letting Adobe’s Lightroom Team share it with us Lightroom users.

Comment form for this post

^#1

Loving the free templates, I feel that Lightroom needs more web templates to make the “web” module a little more userable. If every photographer had the same template to showcase their portfolios it would get very boring very quickly.

I wonder, when is Adobe going to sort the “slideshow” module. It badly needs better ways to export slideshows, like to youtube / iPod / iDVD / flash video etc. Would be nice if there was a way to record your own audio commentary as well - this would be fantastic compared to export to pdf. I am predicting we will have to wait till Lightroom version 2.0 but I would be willing to pay for such an upgrade. If you have any information on that Scott, I’m sure I am not the only one who would love to hear about it.

Still, rant over, thanks for the web gallery tip, I am working on a portfolio site right now so I will certainly see what I can do directly in Lightroom.

Ed O'Keeffe on January 17th, 2008 at 6:26 am

^#2

Hi,

The big problem with simpleviewer, which in my eyes makes it unsuable, is that when you view the images in a size smaller than the original image, the image - although it scales down - will pixelate heavily, and you images will look ragged and “horrible” with far less detail.

Just my 2 cents

Thanks,
Thomas Schreiber
Denmark, Europe

Thomas Schreiber on January 17th, 2008 at 7:46 am

^#3

And if you are willing to spend a little cash on a web gallery, I came across slideshowpro.net It makes one pretty awesome slide show that comes with a crazy amount of options and tweaks. I purchase it about a month ago and have no regrets. Here is the link for anyone interested:

http://slideshowpro.net/products/slideshowpro/slideshowpro_for_lightroom

They have it as a LR gallery or in flash. Very cool.

Pete

Pete on January 17th, 2008 at 8:14 am

^#4

Wow! Thanks for sharing. I had no idea this gem was included in the latest update! It works fantastic.

Cheers,
Laurel

Laurel on January 17th, 2008 at 8:42 am

^#5

Hey Scott thanks for showing all that I didn’t even notice they were there. I have one idea that I wanted to run across you. I know that your a busy person but I think you should put more of your pictures in your portfolio. Hope to see some more of your pictures in the future. Thanks for all you do here at your blog, I stop here daily. Sean

Sean Kukowski on January 17th, 2008 at 9:46 am

^#6

Thanks to Pete Also!

The slideshow plug-in for LR might just make me get off the “dime” and add LR to my growing software collection.

Regards,

MikeV

Michael Van der Tol on January 17th, 2008 at 9:53 am

^#7

this is nice but I second the slideshow pro plug in for $25.00 .. it’s all good stuff though.

Larry on January 17th, 2008 at 11:38 am

^#8

Pete,
Thank you so much for sharing that plug-in link. I don’t have Lightroom yet, but I do have Flash

Lora!

Lora Fitzpatrick on January 17th, 2008 at 12:18 pm

^#9

When did they put that there? I have never seen it! Way cool!
~randy

Randy Jay Braun on January 17th, 2008 at 1:42 pm

^#10

Scott,
Do you know when Adobe will publish the Lightroom SDK for developers who want to build their own plugins?
Thanks
Jean-Luc

Jean-Luc on January 17th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

^#11

Hey Scott, I just received volume 2 of The Digital Photography Book (love it) I also got your 7 point system book. However, I can not open the pic files in either CS3 or Lightroom. I double checked and I have the latest update for Camera Raw and Lightroom. Any suggestions?

Josh on January 17th, 2008 at 2:31 pm

^#12

The Simpleviewer gallery has been free on the author’s website for quite a while–maybe the others have as well. And, as Thomas alludes to you do need to resize the images yourself to the size they will be viewed at for best results.

Rob on January 17th, 2008 at 3:14 pm

^#13

Hey Scott, thanks for pointing out the new Airtight SimpleViewer. While it does give you the abilty to include some text on the website, and that’s a good thing, I would find it even more useful if I could also add an email link. What I would most like to have is a slick looking template like SimpleViewer that gave me the option to add different galleries as well as additional pages that I could use for prices and other related information. I guess i’m asking for a full-blown photo gallery website template that a (none code writing) photographer can use. Know of one?

Cheers,
Daniel

Daniel Lamont on January 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

^#14

Yeah I saw this on Matt’s blog the other day, they sure did sneak them in, I never knew the existed.

I have been looking for a horizontal scrolling image gallery for ages. Now if I could just learn how to make it look more like a webpage with links…

James on January 17th, 2008 at 7:08 pm

^#15

There is a great Blog that I am sure has been mentioned before, but since this is about Lightroom Galleries, I thought I would mention it again.

http://www.lightroomgalleries.com/

Alan Hess on January 17th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

^#16

Hey Scott, just thought I would promote myself a bit and mention that I just launched my new photography website using the Lightroom Galleries and the Airtight Postcard Viewer for the site… as always, thanks for all your help!
Kendrick Disch (formerly Media Coordinator for the Santa Fe Workshops)
www.kendrickdisch.com

Kendrick Disch on January 20th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

^#17

Hello- I am assisting in a creation of a web gallery with lots of metadata and keywords. Many of the images are species and used for scientific and stock photography. Do you know of any websites, or hosts that work directly with Lightroom? The images are constantly being updated and instead of manually reloading them, is there a way to update them in LR and then have them updated on the web at the same time? Thank you!

Marine on February 7th, 2008 at 2:21 pm