Several weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the new SlideShowPro plug-in for Lightroom. Since that blog post I have gotten a chance to play around with SlideShowPro quite a bit and I have completely revamped my photography website at www.michaelclarkphoto.com using SlideShowPro galleries for all of my portfolio pages. My website has been in need of an upgrade for some time now, and while playing with different layouts I found SlideShowPro to offer a very easy and slick portfolio look that I could integrate into my new website.

The index page uses SlideShowPro so that every time some one visits the site they see a new photo randomly chosen by SlideShowPro. In building all of the portfolio pages for my website I have found it really quite easy to change out images using Lightroom and SlideShowPro and the images look incredible. I chose to have the slideshows not start automatically as it interfered with the drop down menus and this gives the viewer a choice of how they would like to interact with the image - either clicking through them manually using the + symbol or clicking on the triangular play button to start the slideshow.

I did have some trouble initially integrating the Flash slideshows into my HTML pages but I must say the expert customer service on the SlideShowPro website was a big help getting the code dialed in so that the flash galleries worked as they should. If you are trying this out yourself, I can report that the manual which can be downloaded from the SlideShowPro website doesn’t give the correct information on how to achieve this. You can check out the source code on my website if you are curious but here is the main information you’ll have to write into your html source code to make the galleries work.

Place the following text in the pages header between the head tags:

script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/lifestylegallery/js/swfobject.js"

Then in the body of your webpage insert the following text:

script type="text/javascript"
var so = new SWFObject("http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/lifestylegallery/loader.swf", "loader", "858.00", "600.00", "7", "#FFFFFF");
so.addParam("allowFullScreen","true");
so.addParam("base",".");
so.write("flashcontent");

To make these actually work you'll need to move the loader.swf file into a new folder and label that folder "js". Then put that folder inside the folder generated by Lightroom when you exported the slideshow. The contents of the folder should look like those in the image below.

The last step is to dial in the html code so it points to the loader.swf file in the slideshow you want it to reference. All of this sounds very complex and it took me a while to figure out but once you've done it once it all makes sense. Please note that I have had to remove some of the tags in the sample text above - otherwise it would load one of my pages instead of the actual text - so please go view the source text on my website for the full text.

After using SlideShowPro quite extensively to create my new website I have to say it is very simple to use and has so many options that you can create a wide variety of styles and types of slideshows. It is really quite powerful. And as I said in my last post on SlideShowPro to get the best results use Photoshop to size your images to the size you want the final slideshow and then import those images into Lightroom before making the final slideshow.

I opted for a very understated look for on my new website. To achieve this look I changed all of the background colors to white and then went in and dialed the navigation controls to the exact gray tone I wanted. Now that the galleries are loaded into Lightroom, to change out images all I have to do is size them in photoshop, add some sharpening to the new images and then organize the images in the order I want then to appear - and using my preset template saved in the web module of Lightroom I can upload the new set of images to my website. Hence, going forward, it will be very easy to update my website with new images.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark