The other day a friend of mine asked me to come to his house and help him create a simple website slide show. About a year ago he had bought Lightroom (at my suggestion), so I told him to just put the images he wanted in the slide show into a Collections folder and while in that folder to select the Web module.

He laughed and confessed that he only used Lightroom to edit some images every once in a while and print them. He had forgotten everything I had taught him about organizing his images in the application and could not remember what a Collection folder was. He said that he liked Lightroom but he was just an old dog, set in his ways and preferred his own method of organizing his images (he said he could remember where they all where).

I don't really believe that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but there is also some wisdom in letting an old dog sleep under his favorite tree. So I drove over to his house and asked him to show me what he wanted to do. He had some of the images he wanted to use in the slide show on his internal hard disk drive and others in either external hard disk drives (that are not always connected to the computer), or on CD-ROMs that were scattered around the house.

My friend may be old but he is still pretty strong so I just nodded my head when he told me he knew where everything was. I ask him to collect the images he wanted and put them in one folder so we can import them into Lightroom. He smiled and said that he wanted to start with a few images and then decide which other images go into the slide show. So we opened Lightroom and the first thing I did was to create a Collections folder for his slide show.

He showed me where the first couple of images were on his internal drive and I imported them into Lightroom. Then I showed him how to drag the images into the Collections folder and clicked on the Web module to show him how easy it is. A light bulb went off in his head and he started running around the house collecting different CD-ROMs.

Here is how he produced his web based slide show from that point forward:

1. Put a CD-ROM into the computer and select the images he wanted in the finder.

2. Import the selected images into Lightroom and if necessary process the images in the Develop module.

3. Drag the final images selected into the slide show Collections folder.

4. Check the results in the Web module.

5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 until he had all the images he wanted in the slide show.

6. Edit the slide show and export as a set of web pages (ready to ftp to a website)

Is this the right method for creating a website slide show in Lightroom? (I can see a lot of heads shaking no, no, no).

Some of you might even think that my friend was using the wrong application, that he could have used a dedicated slide show or website creation tool to produce his slide show. But I say what the heck, the result was fantastic, my friend is happy and Lightroom was able to deal with the task at hand.