In prior articles I’ve talked about specific customizations that can be achieved by editing the style.xml file (found inside the “..resources/styles” folder) of a Flash Gallery exported from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0. In this article, I’ll touch on a variety of other customizations that relate to text.
If you look closely at the various Flash Gallery templates in Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, you’ll notice some variations in the “look” of image and thumbnail borders (and the drop-shadows too) but if you look in the customization controls of the app, you’ll notice there is no way to change those on any given template. Here’s how to do that manually by editing values in the “style.xml” file (found inside the “..resources/styles” folder) of an exported Flash Gallery.
When you export a Flash Gallery out of Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, it makes a web page for you (index.html) and on that page the gallery always scales to fit the browser window. That’s nice, but sometimes you want to put a gallery into your own web page with other content. If you do that, you may want to turn off the Header bar and Menu bar in the gallery itself (covered in Tips and tricks #2).
You may also want to “fix” the size of the gallery so that it does not auto-scale to fit the available space.
The Header Bar and/or Menu Bar in a Flash Gallery generated by Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 can be turned off (hidden) or made semi-transparent by editing the style.xml file within an exported gallery (found inside the “..resources/styles” folder). This is particularly handy if you have added a background image (covered in Tips and Tricks #1) or if you are putting a gallery into an existing web page (covered in Tips and Tricks #3) and you don’t want or need “headers” in the gallery itself.
You can add a background image to a Flash Gallery generated by Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 by editing the “style.xml” file in an exported gallery (found inside the “..resources/styles” folder). The image will go behind everything else in the gallery including the Title Bar and Menu Bar (which fyi, you can set to be semi-transparent or “hidden” – covered in Tips and Tricks #2.) The background image will always fill the background of the entire gallery, so it will be “stretched” to fit any given browser window.
The controls within the Web tab allow you to customize the Lightroom Flash Gallery templates in a lot of ways. However, you can customize them much further by editing the XML files that are generated when you export a gallery. This requires almost no knowledge of Flash or HTML, and can be done with almost any text editor.
Both Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 allow photographers to create and customize Flash photo galleries using the Adobe Media Gallery, an open-source Flash project hosted on SourceForge. Flash developers wishing to create their own photo galleries for use within these applications may download this source code and use it as a guide for their own projects.
Once a custom .swf photo gallery has been made, Photoshop Elements 5.0 even has a nifty Gallery Maker system that allows developers to include it in the app. However, while Elements has its Gallery Maker, Lightroom does not have such a mechanism.
The following article explains how a Flash author may substitute their own swf for the one Lightroom uses.
Adobe’s Michael Slater and Trent Brown have written an excellent article about the Media Galleries on the Flash Developer Center. In it they describe how you can create your own Flash gallery program as an alternative to the SWF that Adobe provides with ‘GalleryMaker’ API provided with Photoshop Elements 5.0.