Grawgle

Making Lightroom HTML galleries look good

A little while ago, Adobe released Lightroom as a photo management and workflow application. One of the things I quite liked about Lightroom was that you could select a bunch of photos and publish them to a web gallery. As I've been struggling for a while to find a good way of doing photo galleries, I thoguht this was a good opportunity for Adobe to make my life wonderfully easy.

There are two different types of gallery that you can export within Lightroom - a "Flash" gallery and an "HTML" gallery. This seems reasonable, except that there are a couple of problems.

The flash gallery has a wonderful interface that I find rather easy to use. However, because the whole thing is a flash application, you can't send someone a link to an individual photo. Worse, because it resizes it's thumbnail grid on different sized browsers, you can't even send someone a link to the gallery and say "it's on page four, first column, third image along". One of my main requirements is the ability to send someone a link to an individual image and the flash gallery doesn't allow that.

The HTML gallery has a different problem. In this case, you can send someone the url of an individual image, but the whole gallery is rather ugly and in my opinion not very easy to use. I saw this combination of getting it wrong with both methods as a bit of a challenge:

Could I create the nice flash interface on top of the HTML gallery?

What's this meant to look like?

The goal is to develop some sort of deployment script which converts uploaded HTML gallerys into special flashalized-galleries. Such a script should be able to work cross-browser and pick up the settings and colours that the HTML gallery was uploaded with.

I've decided to BSD-licence this as it removes faff and lets anyone do anything with it. If you're using it, feel free to say hello to me and show me where :) Hell, if you make it better, tell me so I can come and see what you've done with it :)

Download

Download grawgle 0.2 (Gzipped Tar)

Download grawgle 0.1 (Gzipped Tar)

Changelog