Bluefire Blog

Photoshop Elements 5.0 was the first Adobe application to ship with an AMG-based Flash Gallery export feature. And if the thousands of galleries Elements users have posted to Adobe Photoshop Showcase in the prior months are any indication, it has been a popular feature! In the past, most Flash based content on the web was created by creative pros. It is really neat to see this and other Adobe initiatives beginning to put tools into the hands of consumers that allow them to create and publish their own rich, interactive content.

It is amazing to see how on one side the Flash platform is being embraced by many more hard-core developers, in part because of Flex and Apollo, and on the other hand consumers are getting into the act sharing their videos, photos, and expressing their creativity via a host of new Flash enabled web services and desktop apps. These two trends are clearly amplifying each other. It is a new day for Flash, and Bluefire could not be more excited to be playing a role in that.

There are a few features of Photoshop Lightroom Flash Web Galleries that I think are particularly cool - especially given that they are AS2 based. I’ll list them here and then discuss them in more detail in subsequent posts:
Fluid Layout
Auto-Swap Image Renditions
Style Customization via XML
Real-time Preview within Lightroom
Smart Loader
Synchronized Views
Multiple Media Type Support
HTML formatting
Adobe Media Gallery XML Specification Compliance

I’ve mentioned before that you can add FLV video clips to Flash Galleries created with Photoshop Lightroom. One important tip that I neglected to include however, is that the flv clips need to be placed in a file location that is “next to” or “under” the gallery.swf. Meaning that the flv clip needs to be anywhere inside the same directory as the gallery.swf (-the “Resources” folder). It can be in a sub folder though, so you could add a “Videos” folder inside “Resources” and put the clips in there. If you instead put the flv clip(s) into the “bin” folder along with the images, (which would otherwise seem to be the right place for it) it won’t work because that bin folder is not a child of “Resources”.

I’ve posted a bit of info in Tips #9 about advanced mode, here I’ll break down that panel a bit more and describe what each control does. To re-iterate, Advanced mode has been described as an experimental, unsupported feature. This appears to be accurate, as many of the controls do not “live preview” inside the app, and you’ll often need to “preview in browser” to see the effects of the settings. I personally find it more efficient to export a gallery first, and then edit the xml files. This way I can immediately “refresh” the preview and see the effects, without having to wait for the preview to be generated each time I make a tweak to a setting in the panels. That said, the panel controls can be very handy if you are exporting multiple galleries and already know the setting you want to apply.

read on…

When exporting a Flash gallery out of Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 it exports three rendition sizes of each image. Those three sizes are “relative” to the “preview size” setting, which you could kind of think of as setting the size for the “largest” of the three.

When the gallery is loaded into a browser, the gallery automatically detects the size of the window, looks at the rendition sizes available, and then downloads the largest rendition size that will fit into the window. It then does some pretty sophisticated pre-fetching of the other images of that size based on visitor behavior (linear vs non-linear browsing of the gallery). The gallery does not download the other renditions at all - unless the end user changes the size of their browser window such that a different rendition size should be used.

read on…

It appears that Flash galleries generated by Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 that have images in the header (for example, an Identity Plate) sometimes have a problem loading images. It seems to occur only on galleries hosted on certain web servers, and then only on certain end-user machines.

**Update This is fixed in LR 1.1

If you wanted an alternative method to put your logo above a gallery, you could add it to the html page itslef, and then “turn off” the header in the gallery.

Here’s how you’d do that:

Photoshop Lightroom 1.o will let you put a custom graphic/identity plate in the header of a Flash gallery. But, sometimes it is hard to tell how it will be scaled. Here’s some info on that. The gallery header can contain a graphic that is up to 46 pixels tall, and up to 600 pixels wide. If you have a long string of text in the right side of the header, it can cause the text on the right to truncate if the browser window is small, and when this happens the baseline of the text shifts downwards a bit (bug). So if you use a really wide graphic, make sure to preview it in a browser window at the smallest size that the gallery will fluidly scale down to (about 650 pixels wide). Note that you can put a .jpg, gif, or PNG graphic in there, or a SWF. To do this manually you’d edit a line of text in the style.xml file of an exported Flash gallery:

<pageTitleImg visible=”true” src=”bin/images/myheadergraphic.swf”/>

Note that it appears that galleries hosted on certain web servers, and then on some end-user machines have a problem loading images when a graphic is in the header. I’ve posted some additional info about that here

I’ve blogged about this topic before, but, as there have been several requests for clarification, I’m touching on it again and this time including an example. The key to embedding the gallery swf into a web page is to understand that the “path” to the the resources the gallery needs to work (the XML files) is hard coded into the swf. You can over-ride this with Flashvars, but you don’t need to. Simply move the gallery.swf file into the same folder on your web server as the html page you want it to be in, then move the bin and resources folders in there as well. Now you can use simple embed code to add your swf into your html page.

read on…

Update: Using FlashVars Post

In my previous blog post about background images, I mentioned in passing that a swf file can be used as the background image (it is an “unsupported” feature though) . There are lots of nifty things you can do with that (if you know Flash) like having a video wallpaper background, but one of the more common uses might be to add background music to your gallery.

read on…

Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 does not support importing video clips into the Library, but because the Flash gallery feature of Lightroom is based on AMG, which does support video clips, you CAN have .flv video clips in a Falsh gallery that has been exported from Lightroom - you’ll just have to add those manually.

read on…

Within a Flash Gallery created by Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 the Metadata you choose to display for “Title” and “Caption” appears below the photos in a “horizontal” text field. You can change this to a “vertical” text field that sits to the left of the photos (and you can style that caption including having a background color and border).

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OK, tired of editing the XML files to further customize your Flash Gallery? There is an alternative - for style customizations at least. You can put the Web module of Lightroom into “advanced mode” (an “expirmental and usupported” feature - so try this at your own risk) which will expose MANY more customization options in the Lightroom panels.

To go into Advanced Mode you’ll need to use a keyboard combo:

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What if you had a background image and you wanted the images in your gallery to align to a “frame” (for example a TV screen) in the background? (see article #1 about that) This is particularly tricky if you don’t want that location to be “centered” in the gallery as it does by default. This can be done in a Photoshop Lightroom Flash gallery, though I will warn you that it is a bit complex, and will take a fair amount of trial and error work to figure out. You would also need to make your own image renditions and edit the “group.xml” file (which I’ll discuss in a future article). This is only really worth it to someone who REALLY wants to achieve this effect and is willing to work through it. For everyone else, this might be an interesting read just so you have a basic understanding of the XML related to the image canvas.

read more…

The thumbnail area of a gallery and the “slideshow” area of a gallery (the area that the images, captions, and playback buttons are in) can have their own background color and border. You can set the transparency (alpha) and color of either area independently. The settings for this are a bit “spread out” in the style.xml file. Look for:

<thumbnailviewborder color=”CCCCCC” alpha=”100.00″/>
<thumbnailviewbgcolor alpha=”6.00″ color=”382828″/>
<slideshowbgcolor color=”FFFFFF” alpha=”0.00″/>
<slideshowborder color=”CCCCCC” alpha=”100.00″/>

The alpha values are particularly handy if you have a background image (see article #1).

All galleries exported by Photoshop Lightroom use the “fade” transition between images. You can change that to “cut” or use a “fancy” transition (I don’t like them much personally). You can also set the “duration” of the transitions as well as setting the duration of each ‘slide’ when the gallery is played back in slideshow mode. The related bits of xml (in style.xml) looks like this:

<slidetransitions slideDuration=”5.00″ transitionDuration=”.75″ transition=”fade”/>

Durations are in seconds, and transition type choices are “fade”, “cut”, “blinds”, “iris”, or “pixDissolve”