The other day I posted some of the photos I shot in San Antonio using a WordPress plugin called NextGen Gallery. It was pretty easy to do, but I am not sure I like how the photos look using that direct plug-in. For one thing the photos seem small when played in the slideshow and the quality doesn’t do the photos the justice I would like. It is a little better when you click on individual photos and they pop open using flash.
In any case, since I have lots of photos from the JAWS conference, I decided to create the slideshows using my usual software and put them on my website. It may be that one of the reasons the photos look better there is they are created with Adobe Lightroom’s Web Gallery and a plug-in template from The Turning Gate. The image size created by this program is larger then the crunched down images which are created when uploaded to the web through most web-based slideshows. Since my web host allows for unlimited web space, I can do “afford” to run the slideshows this way.
I have been using The Turning Gate plug-ins for years now. The site owner is Matthew Campagna does a great job creating these applications. Over the years they have gotten better and better. He used to provide them for free and just ask for donations and I have made donations in the past. Now he charges for the plug-ins, but the cost is reasonable.
The only problem I found when I bought the latest version of his monoslideshow, was that the new version did not import the old settings, so I have had to redo all the settings and the template is quite different even though the output behaves about the same as the old program. Once you figure out which options relate to what you see on the screen, it is fairly easy to tweak. Matthews tutorials give the actual html code that is created by the template, which is helpful to someone like me for tweaking the end product. But since I am not an html coder, it is only minimally helpful. I wish that Matthew would do a tutorial which broke down each section of the template and had a diagram that identified the corresponding elements that are created.
Today I finally got the monoslideshow working how I wanted and uploaded 4 separate slideshows related to my recent JAWS trip:
I still want to create a gallery page with all the slideshows listed. I want to include all the JAWS slideshows I have done. But The Turning Gate has new templates for the gallery page and generic pages. I will want to use those, but I now need to buy the new versions, install them and learn about the new settings. This may take a while.
Meantime, enjoy the photos at the above links.
