Help with Online Web Galleries.

I need to build a series of web galleries.
We need to make available to our students, 5x7 images that they can download and have printed.
We have over 1000 photos.

In the past, we made galleries and then had them identify which images they wanted and then we would email them the higher res photo. Now we want to eliminate the middle man and just let them link to the images so we don't have to do the legwork, it's just too time intensive. We already have our web servers ready to serve the 1-2 GB of images needed.

I already did batch edits in Photoshop to get the photos to the exact size and resolution needed.

Now I want to create web galleries (5 in total). I need the thumbnail links in the galleries to point to the original images, not the bastardized bigger thumbnail that Bridge creates.

In the past, I've used other programs that had no problem with this. Years ago I used ACDSee Photo Software, then I switched to Dreamweaver witch did the job (for several years), now with Bridge, I've lost the ability.


I am using CS5. I don't have to use Bridge but this seems to be the software Adobe is now forcing us to use. I do have the full selection of CS5 Programs.

This project needed to be up and running (like most projects ) yesterday.


I'm pulling my hair out here

Does anyone know of a way I can create these without having to go back and edit the over 1000 pages of HTML manually to get the original images to show up on the secondary pages? In fact, i don't even need to create a secondary page (as Bridge does), the thumbnail link can just point directly to the higher-res photo.
campionidelmondo says...

I dunno how you'd do it using CS5 software, but using a server-side scripting language like PHP it'd be a matter of a couple of lines of code to enumerate through one folder (of thumbnails) and display each one as a link that points to the bigger image ... given that they have some similarity in name (e.g. the thumbnail of 1.jpg is named 1_tn.jpg or named the same but in a 'thumb' subfolder...).

Kevlar says...

>> ^campionidelmondo:

I dunno how you'd do it using CS5 software, but using a server-side scripting language like PHP it'd be a matter of a couple of lines of code to enumerate through one folder (of thumbnails) and display each one as a link that points to the bigger image ... given that they have some similarity in name (e.g. the thumbnail of 1.jpg is named 1_tn.jpg or named the same but in a 'thumb' subfolder...).


Beat me to the punch, campioni.

1. From the Bridge side you'll want to run a batch Image Processing to generate your thumbnails (might want to run one action for resizing landscape photos versus run another action for resizing portrait photos). I believe Batch options are in the Tools > Photoshop > Batch menu.

2. From the website end you'll absolutely want to use a more dynamic language (PHP, ASP) to traverse your images/thumbs directories and dynamically generate your gallery. Do not do this manually with static HTML!

3. Fancy up your presentation with pagination (via PHP/ASP) and a lightbox-esque modal window popup for the images when clicking on the thumbnails (I'm personally a fan of Shadowbox but these are a dime a dozen).

Good luck!

Sagemind says...

Being at a college, our entire website is filtered through a content management system (Ironpoint).
Because of this all pages are restricted to use the tools built withing that system.

I get around this by posting galleries on a secondary server and embedding that site within the Ironpoint page and template. http://www.okanagan.bc.ca/administration/publicaffairs/Ceremonies/Grad_Photos.html

You'll notice older galleries (2009-2010) are built using Dreamweaver and work just fine linking to the original image (although we were using smaller versions at the time). The last set (Winter 2011) was built using Bridge. Another problem with bridge is that it changes the file names which completely messes with our image filing system.

I'm afraid PHP and ASP are out of my parameters. The pages must be stand alone files I can just FTP to the secondary server.
If I can't use the adobe software (which is a huge oversight from Adobe, then I'll need to find different software - maybe hunt down an old version of ACDSee. (I run a Mac at work and my old software is Win so still not a clean fix)

gwiz665 says...

It's a bit ugly, but if you run it from a secondary server you can do this:

Use php to generate a html file.

Copy the source of that, and save it to an actual html file and put that on the secondary server.

embed the file you generated once in the main site.

Profit.

Sagemind says...

Thanks everyone.

I'm going back to using ACDSee. I just installed it on my windows laptop and built all the galleries I needed in under 5 minutes. Having created all the thumbnails and HTML pages I needed I only have to go in and tweak the headers on each thumbnail pages using the text option in Dreamweaver.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Sorry Adobe

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