Totally flexible image galleries are a major new feature of SiteGrinder 2 Pro, with a huge number of options. This feature is aimed at photographers, artists, gallery owners, and anyone else with a number of images they wish to display in an attractive, flexible, and easily navigable gallery format.
It is possible to create a gallery of images with SiteGrinder Basic, but it involves the manual creation of many pages and buttons.
SiteGrinder 2 Pro supports robust automatic gallery creation from folders of images based on a very small number of buttons and pages in the Photoshop document.
There are a number of resources to help you quickly get up and running with your own galleries:
- A full list of gallery features
- A description of the basic gallery creation work-flow
- Step by step tutorials for creating various galleries
- A list of the hints associated with galleries
Gallery feature list
- Automatic forward / backward sequential navigation between images
- Custom layouts to match any image width-to-height proportions
- Choose "Letterboxing" or cropping when image size/proportions don't match display areas
- Images can be given alt tags for search engine support
- Custom compression settings for images that require resizing
- Auto-creation of thumbnail images at user-chosen sizes and positions
- Auto-linking of thumbnails to full-sized images
- Optionally place thumbnails on same page as full-sized images
- Pages with full-sized images can also display jpeg metadata in multiple areas anywhere on the page using custom text styles
- Auto creation of navigation from image pages back to thumbnail pages
- Standard SiteGrinder buttons can act as thumbnails
- Layer sets/groups can function as thumbs
- Layer set/group thumbs can use image metadata to uniquely label each thumbnail
- Auto creation of grid layout of thumbnails (thumbsheets)
- Thumbsheets can be scrolling and have customizable spacing between thumbs
- Auto creation, when necessary, of multiple pages of thumbs with navigation
- Optional support for already existing thumbnails
- Support for "rotated" jpegs
The Gallery Workflow
Galleries are created in the following way:
- Create a single page design using a layer comp with the -gallery hint and an image layer with the -picturebox layer hint. The -picturebox layer indicates where a full-sized image should be displayed on the page. The -gallery layer comp hint allows SiteGrinder to associate this gallery page with any other pages in the same gallery, such as thumbnail pages.
- Add next, previous, and, optionally, up buttons to this single design for sequential navigation from one image to another and, optionally, from the full-sized image pages back to thumbnail pages. SiteGrinder will atumatically link these buttons as appropriate on each page of thumbnails or images.
- Optionally create another layer comp page design with the same name as the first comp indicating size and position of thumbnails images for navigation directly to corresponding images.
- Open SiteGrinder Pro and use the Galleries pane to identify the folder of images on your hard disk from which to generate the gallery.
Thus a folder of image files and one or two Photoshop page designs will generate a complex gallery with both thumbnail-based and next/previous-based navigation.
The Hints Associated with Making Galleries
Click on a hint for documentation:
