Okay - weighing in here. I have been tagging this thread since I am always interested in updating my own galleries. I am definitely going to have to look into slideshow pro.
Now, to Snapper’s original post. Snapper, I don’t know html - but the galleries that you see at http://www.oakleyphotography.co.uk/ and http://www.franckfollet.com/architecture.html
and http://www.ambientlife.co.uk/gallery_65204.html can all be pretty much done in Freeway. These are basically rollovers. They may have done it a different way, but you could do it with a rollover - really no big.
The elegance comes down to the graphic design of your site. Franck Follets presentation - nice but it is a pain to update. Not because of the code - easy - but because you have to pair images together and graphically they have to work together.
The only site that is really any different is Brian Hancock’s and he used SlideShow Pro. I am going to have to look at that - it is really nice for a couple of reasons…
First, check out my site - www.robertjillson.com If you go to the architecture page - it is all rollovers and all done if Freeway Express and all done by a newbie who doesn’t know code.
Now - the bummer of my site and all the sites you and I listed above except for Brian’s is that it can be a pain to change out an image and it can be a pain to re-order the photos. My thumbnail on the right is linked to a large image on the left which is in a stack of all the images. When you click (or rollover - another option in freeway) on the thumb nail then the linked image pops to the top of the stack. Paying attention to which image is which is important if you want to go in and re-order or add a new image.
In Brian’s slide show the beauty of it is that he just has to throw the images he wants into a folder, put them in the order he wants and have SlideShow Pro generate a slide show.
I hope that all helps - FYI, I did a reasonably good check on a whole bunch of the top commercial photographer’s websites before I designed my own. Some were very fancy with flash, etc… However, some of the biggest names had very simple but elegant sites. A client off the street may be wowed by Flash, but someone in an ad agency just wants it clean and simple so they can get through your site and find the pictures.
One last thing - Lightroom is very much worth it if you are going through a reasonable large number of photos, especially if most of the changes you make to your photos are exposure, color, touch up or cropping related. It becomes a real pain to open 20 photos in photoshop if all you are going to do is adjust the curves, crop and then output - especially if you want to output multiple resolutions of the file. Lightroom does all of that really really well. If however, you approach each photo as a painter would a canvas - then just photoshop.
again - hope that all helps
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