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).
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:
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.
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”
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.