Lightroom: It’s Those Little Things…
I spend a lot of time in Lightroom – I happen to think its a fantastic program for a photographer to shoot, catalog, edit, preview, and print. That notwithstanding I always find myself saying “wow, yes.. wow.. yes.. wow.. awesome!” up until the point that I get to the Slideshow and Web modules. I’ll leave the Slideshow module out of it for the time being and today just focus on a few things that I wish happened on the web module side. To be fair – the Web module does work, and in many cases works well. Its just the teeny things that drive me up a wall.

1. More Headless Galleries:
Back at Photoshop World I taught a couple of classes that talked about online galleries – photos or otherwise (I mean hey.. graphic designers need to put galleries together too). I found it a little cumbersome that the Flash and HTML galleries in Lightroom (obviously excluding the stuff that Airtight did for Lightroom) had to have everything setup with a header and sidebar. If I am going to export this gallery onto a website that already has a layout, couldnt I just get a gallery without any of the header information? A ‘headless’ gallery that only contained the stuff a gallery needs would make inclusion into existing websites great.

2. Add some form of “Do not update the HTML checkbox” option:
Let’s say that I take a web gallery and export it into a Dreamweaver site. I apply a template to it, changing the layout and strip all of the unnecessary stuff from the page and post it on the web. Two days later, I update my portfolio. When re-exporting the page, it overwrites all of the stuff I did originally. Now I have to redo that work. If there was some option to update the XML and Images folder only, then updating the gallery of a specific page would be a lot easier.

3. Make a plugin that leverages Dreamweaver:
If we’re publishing to the web (and it seems the general trend that Adobe wants to push.. leverage -all- of the applications) then lets make a plugin that you can add to the web module. In it, you can select a drop down for existing Dreamweaver websites on your computer, then select a template that you may already have setup. When the program exports out, it automatically writes into that template.

Read the rest of the things i’d like to see in Lightroom by click on the Read More link below!

4. Make an ‘awesome’ client review gallery in Flash:
Many photographers use Lightroom to capture a shoot. From there, they take their picks and want to share them with someone to have them decide which of those picks -they- like, and add comments. A flash gallery that shows the image with a “Pick/Reject” Flag and a comment field would be good. Once it’s complete the customer/client can click submit, and all of that can be forwarded along in an email. This is already being done in some form or another right now. Look at LightRoom Galleries for some inspiration there.

5. Make cooler Flash galleries:
IMHO the coolest galleries that Lightroom has going for it are the Airtight Interactive galleries built into it? However – doing a search on the web you can see that there are a TON of Flash Component galleries that use XML for location that do some really cool display of images.

Take the XML Thumbnail Gallery V.3 by Leskography for example – That runs about 15 dollars. But how cool would that be if it were something you could have right inside of Lightroom? For me, i’d probably get rid of the text stuff and just have it be the component stripped of “Gallery Name” but thats minor cosmetic. That was even written in Actionscript 2.

Or check out Sepia Flash Photo Gallery - Full screen of an image with an auto hidden side navigation.

Landing Resizeable Gallery

Advanced XML Image Gallery V2

This is just a random search that i did off of 1 site – i’m sure there are tons of other cool examples here. The short of it is this.. a cool Flash Gallery with a -little- bit of flair, but headerless so that people can place this into their own websites.

6. JQuery based Galleries:
As much as there are people out there that dig the Flash galleries from a security standpoint (preventing right clicks and stuff) JQuery lets you do a lot of cool stuff – and having galleries in LR that do that would also be good (Thanks MWarf and Tanya Plonka!)

7. MP3 Information for Info Field = Strobist Heaven:
Obviously being a Photographer slants what i’d do with it, but follow along with me here. Take the XML Thumbnail Gallery V.3 by Leskography for example and click on one of the thumbnails. On the upper right corner of the picture, there is an I button, that lets you display the captioning info in a field. What if directly under that I there were another speaker. What if when you clicked on THAT speaker, you’d launch an MP3 audio of you talking about that picture- providing additional details that a caption really wouldnt work for:

- It would TOTALLY make your website sticky because people would want to hear what you say about your work (Helllooooo strobist information here)
- Photogs wouldn’t only benefit. Imagine a graphic designer using this for a portfolio. They can then speak to their work better.
- It would make the viewing experience ‘personal’ – people like hearing from other people. It gives good vibes..
- It would create a ‘self tour’ option for your site, prompting people to want to dig through your site to find more – let’s face it.. we’re voyeuristic by nature.

Now.. again, I happen to think that the Galleries that Lightroom has on there are great – and even the Flash galleries that they’ve built can totally help people if they’re doing one off galleries. I don’t espouse all of this to say that they should be eliminated. I just think that in a time when we are telling people “More and more, Photographers are taking to the web” – we really should be giving them -cooler- options to do so, and options that leverage other applications in the Creative Suite.

Hey.. what do you think.. any other ideas you think would be cool? Let me know here or on my Twitter page

Some Cool Places for Flash Galleries:
Digicrafts Components
Thomas Menath’s LTD Airtight Tiltviewer
Flash Components
LightRoom Galleries
DIMIN Slideshow