You may have noticed something new on the site if you happen to call back here fairly regularly. On the sidebar of the site, there’s now a natty little flash slideshow running, showing a random selection of my photos. Underneath, there’s a link, which takes to you an altogether more fancy setup which allows you to browse multiple galleries in a very fluid, very organized way. Both of these are constructed using the same piece of software – Slideshow Pro (www.slideshowpro.net). Slideshow Pro (SSP), is an environment based on Flash, where you can set up multiple different types of slideshow, from the simple to the more complicated, with relative ease.
There are several flavours of SSP – all produce a similar output, but in different ways. The first (and currently most used) version, is SSP for Flash. This consists of flash plugins that enable you to construct a slideshow inside flash and export it to upload to a website. The second, and the version I use, is a plugin for Adobe Lightroom. This causes SSP to be aded as a ‘Slideshow Type’ in the ‘Web’ section of lightroom, so you can construct slideshows from any combination of your images in your Lightroom library.
These cost $29 for the Flash plugin, and $25 for the Lightroom plugin respectively. Both have extremely good docs, great support on the SSP forum, and are well worth the asking price.
Thirdly, there’s Slideshow Pro Director. This is not an alternative to the above plugins, as you still require those to create your initial layout. What SSP Director is, is a way of managing your slideshows, allowing you top upload images, create albums and galleries, and tweak many aspects of the way it all works, dierctly from a browser. It is MySQL and PHP based, so you’ll need a webhost that supports these, and be reasonably up on their basic use to install it. It honestly isn’t difficult, and the SSP people provide a free server compatibility check download for you to make sure it’ll work on your host’s server before you buy the full thing. If you’ve installed WordPress, Joomla, CMS Made simple or anything else that uses MySQL and PHP, you’ll know hat I mean. You just need to make sure that the table prefix doesn’t match anything you have at the moment (unlikely!).
Director costs $29 per domain. They used to charge just for director, and you could use it on as many domains as you wanted to. This changed to a domain lock-in system on the current release. It’s a part of the install process, and it registers the domain you are installing it onto with the company. This license IS transferrable to another domin however. For the price, it’s well worth it in my opinion, as director is the very nice and tast icing on the cake of SSP.
Director allows you to manage your slideshows and galleries once you have them online. What it doesn’t do is enable you to fiddle with the layout and design of your slideshows – this still has to be done in Flash or Lightroom. Director provides an easy link to an XML file for each album and/or gallery of albums you create. This link is then simply pasted into the Lightroom or Flash plugin during the design, which then takes the images from the web gallery for its content, rather than the local files. This means you can do all the layout with local files as examples, then sikply paste in the XML link to make SSP use the web gallery instead. Easy once you get your head around it!
You then export the gallery to a folder, which brings together all the SWF and site files (only abot 5 or six if I remember) for you to upload. You can either use the default index.html it provides, or take the code from that and add it into your own pages.
Once uploaded, the original SWF file does not ever have to be changed if you don’t want to. You can simply edit the galleries that you want to, and the SWFs that use them will use whatever images are provided. Another very good aspect of Director is it’s ‘on demand’ publishing system. Simply put, SSP Director automatically resizes (and caches on your webspace) images that are required for your SWF galleries. So… say you had a two galleries, both using the same images, but different sizes. You can point two differnt sized slideshows at the same XML file, and director will resize the files on the fly to fit the correct SWF. It will then cache the resized images so that the next visitor will not need to wait for them to be resized again. As the first visitor is almost always yourself when you’re testing the gallery, subsequent visitors get the gallery displayed with little or no delay.
I’ve not covered all the options available here. For example, you can actually make video slideshows too, as well as adding music etc to your SWFs. The full list of features can be found on the SSP site (www.slideshowpro.net). I love this piece of software, and all of my images will, from now on, be published using it. Take a look at the full gallery by clicking the link under the slideshow in the sidebar, clicking the slideshow itself, or by going here – http://www.axemansplace.co.uk/gallery/maingallery/.
Cheers!