Introduction
The -gallery hint is part of SiteGrinder Pro's powerful automatic image gallery creation system.
Click here for a complete overview of this system and its many options.
The -gallery hint, like the -page hint, is added to a layer comp to tell SiteGrinder Pro that a layer comp page or a SiteGrinder Tools Page Definition is part of an image gallery.
An image gallery must, at minimum, have one -gallery page with a -picturebox layer visible on it.
A gallery can have an additional page containing thumbnails. SiteGrinder will automatically link thumbnails to images.
A gallery can also have additional pages with differently sized -pictureboxes to match the different width-to-height ratios of your images. SiteGrinder will automatically choose the correct page for each image.
All of these pages will be named the same, for example "Vacation-gallery", and are considered part of the same gallery.
Galleries have many options you can set using the Galleries pane of the SiteGrinder Pro window:
- Thumbnail border settings
- The directory of images associated with a gallery
- How images will scale (when necessary) in a picturebox
- The HTML page titles of gallery pages
- The alt tag contents for the gallery images
Gallery pages work together with the following hints:
Types of Galleries
Galleries can be divided into three main types:
- Those with no thumbnails, just a series of pages with a full sized image on each
- Those with full sized images and thumbnails together on the same page(s)
- Those with thumbnail pages that are separate from the full sized image pages
It's helpful to decide which of these types you are making and plan accordingly when you start.
Naming Gallery Pages
The part of the page name that comes before the -gallery hint enables SiteGrinder Pro to match this gallery page to other gallery pages that are part of the same gallery.
Thus you might have three gallery pages named "Still lifes-gallery":
- The first might contain -thumb layers to show thumbnail versions of the images in this gallery.
- On the second there could appear a -picturebox layer to show wide (landscape) oriented images from this collection.
- The third could contain a different -picturebox layout for tall (portrait) oriented images.
SiteGrinder will know they are all part of the same gallery because the names are identical.
When you open SiteGrinder you will see these three pages listed as one page since they are all part of the same gallery.
Making Multiple Galleries from the Same Design
Many users will want to create multiple galleries, often with the same design but a different set of images.
There are two ways to do this:
The slow, flexible way
To accomplish this the slow way, you can use Photoshop's "Duplicate layer comp" command to duplicate all the layer comps that make up the gallery you are copying.
You would then change the names of all of the copied comps to the name of your new gallery.
The advantage to this technique is that you can add whatever customizations you like to new gallery pages.
The super-fast, less flexible way
SiteGrinder ships with a demo file using comp galleries named "Gallery-4 from 1 comp".
Click on it in the "Sample Files" area of SG's "Report" panel to open it in Photoshop.
If you don't need a lot of customization you can clone your first gallery design to instantly create more galleries.
Here's how it works:
- Create the buttons you will use to link to your galleries. Any time SiteGrinder finds a button without a matching page you have an opportunity to get SiteGrinder to copy a page that is defined and link the dangling button to it. This is what cloning is. For this example let's say we make a button named "grand canyon-button" and another named "yosemite-button" to link to galleries from two trips.
- Create the layer comps for the gallery and name them "yosemite-gallery" to match the first button
- Open SiteGrinder.
- Switch to the "Pages" panel.
- You will notice that there is a page called "grand canyon" even though you made no layer comp page for it. Click in the checkbox to the left of it to tell SiteGrinder to make a page for it.
- Use the "Clone new page from" menu to select "yosemite-gallery". This will cause all unassigned pages to use the "yosemite-gallery" design.
- Switch to the "Galleries" panel and select a different folder of images for each gallery.
- Click the "Build" button
You can even add a type layer with the -metadata hint to do a little page customization using the [[pagename]] or [[foldername]] metadata identifiers supplied by SiteGrinder.
Linking to Galleries
SiteGrinder handles most of the navigation within galleries automatically:
- thumbnails automatically link to image pages
- next/prev buttons automatically link between image pages
- up-buttons automatically link from image pages back to thumbnail pages
The only other kind of linking is linking between non-gallery pages and gallery pages.
There are two techniques for linking to galleries:
Automatic button name matching
If you have gallery pages named "vacation-gallery" then you can link to the gallery those pages represent by naming a layer "vacation-button", just like linking to other kinds of pages with SiteGrinder.
For a gallery with thumbnail pages separate from the full sized image pages SiteGrinder will link to the first page of thumbnails.
For galleries with thumbnails on the same page as full sized images SiteGrinder will link to the first image in the gallery.
Using SiteGrinder's "Button" panel
You can link to a gallery from any button in your document with the following steps:
- Open SiteGrinder
- Select the "Buttons" panel
- Click in the "Link" column to the right of the button you wish to set
- In the dialog that appears select "Page" as the link type
- Now select the gallery from the popup menu of pages
