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About Jon...
Jon Canfield is a digital imaging instructor and co-author of “Photo Finish:
The Digital Photographer’s Guide to Printing, Showing, and Selling Images”
by Sybex. You can visit Jon on the web at www.joncanfield.com.
Have you considered creating a web gallery of your images? If so, you may have
looked into online services such as MSN, AOL, and Yahoo—all of which offer
personal storage space and simple photo galleries. You’ve probably noticed
that you don’t have many options with these services. They decide on the
layout, how big your images are, etc. In other words, your gallery looks like
the tens of thousands of other galleries on their service.
Starting From Scratch
If you want to learn more about creating a photo gallery from scratch, Jon Canfield
goes into detail on this subject in his book, Photo Finish: The Digital
Photographer’s Guide To Printing, Showing, And Selling Images, from
Sybex.
Standing Out From The Crowd
If you already have a website, or are thinking of starting one, there are a
number of options available for setting up a photo gallery. Most of them require
no web coding skills, and you may already own one or more of these tools. All
of the popular image editors and photo organizers include web page creation
features. Some of them let you build a fairly sophisticated website with just
a few mouse clicks. Before starting, I recommend that you select all of the
images you want to put online and make a copy of them in a new folder. This
will make it easier once you’ve started to create the photo gallery, and
keeps your original files safe for other uses.
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FIGURE 1: The Web Photo Gallery feature of Photoshop (and Elements)
provides a number of choices to easily create an attractive photo
gallery for your website.
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Photoshop and Photoshop Elements both offer web templates and make it easy
to customize text and color. The latest version of Photoshop, CS2, even includes
templates with Flash animation. Creating a photo gallery in these applications
is as simple as selecting File>Automate>Web Photo Gallery (Photoshop)
or File>Create> Web Photo Gallery (Elements). Elements also has a quick
link to this feature from the start up screen—just click Create Project.
The features of both are similar, so I’ll use Photoshop for the examples
shown here.
After opening the Web Photo Gallery dialog box, select the style you want to
use from the list. I’ve chosen a simple template that uses a large image
along with a scrolling list of thumbnails. Any thumbnail a visitor selects will
be shown on the same page, replacing the current large image.
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FIGURE 2: The completed gallery as it appears in a web browser.
Total effort? Not much, especially for a nice looking web gallery!
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