Finally got round to sifting through the maze of options provided with one of the latest versions of SlideShowPro the other day. I’ve had the software for a while now, but have so far only used it as a quick ‘slam images together, upload’ method. I’ve now finally gone through all the settings that I like/dislike/changed, and saved them as a template in Lightroom. Upshot is that I’ve now updated all my galleries at: http://www.orangeblob.com/portfolios.html….
Views on the plugin? I like it. I bump into a few photography sites on the net which use the SlideShowPro solution, and that always makes me a little worried – am I just doing the same thing as everyone else? But I’m not exactly a flash developer born and bred, and this really does exactly what I want it to. It lets me showcase images in galleries that I can create in LR, exactly as I do for any other collection of images, and then publish them. All pretty easily.
Things I like:
- Just about everything is customisable
- You can preview everything in a browser before you even export the gallery
- Integration with Lightroom is great – you have to remind yourself now and again that it’s not actually Adobe software
- It looks professional, on a not-huge-amounts-of-work level
Things I don’t like*:
- I’d like to be able to hyperlink the titles or descriptions in the headers of the galleries
- I’d like to be able to customise the HTML behind the page. e.g. I’d like to be able to edit the ‘index.html’ template so that my google analytics code always gets put up automatically, or to be able to edit the html ‘title’ and ‘description’ of the page.
- Urm, that’s about it… no other complaints!
Anyway, I’ve updated my online galleries – with some new images (new, depending on when you last looked at it) and with some improved formatting. I have a background=black website… it’s been on my to-do list for ages to get rid of the dark grey background to the slideshow. Make it black already.
Check out the new galleries here: http://www.orangeblob.com/portfolios.html
*Disclaimer – this stuff might actually be already in there, I just haven’t found it yet… Let me know if you’re reading this, and you know it is! Also, I’m only using the ‘plugin’ version for Lightroom – there could well be a different story when using the full version of SlideShowPro. Check out their website for more info.
