Adding Lightroom Web Galleries to Websites - Flash

[MichaelBrown]

I've done a bit of searching on this, but haven't seen much explanation on this. I'm hoping to use Lightroom to drive the web galleries on my website, which I am building in Flash. My approach has been exporting a flash based gallery from lightroom, placing it and all its related contents into the same folder as the root .swf of my site, and then creating a urlRequest that loads the lightroom gallery into my site.

This works fine, but if I want to have multiple galleries, they will need to be organized into individual folders. When I do this it flash gets confused because it looks for the galleries .xml file and images in the folder containing the parent .swf instead of the folder that the gallery .swf has been placed.

Is there a way to get around this issue- by somehow redirecting where flash looks for the xml and images?

Or would it be easier to build an html site and use that to embed the various lightroom galleries?

Thanks!

 

[johnbeardy]

It should be possible, but I suspect you know you're getting into deep waters with Flash coding! Apart from anything else, Web was designed for single gallery output, which is a shame, so the built-in Flash engine was designed to that spec and is a bit of a black hole. One place to look is Bluefire TV who were the contractors who designed the engine. There may be a hint on their blog http://blog.bluefire.tv/ or they may be able to tell you how to switch the xml file. You might then end up with one copy of the movie at root level, and switch its xml at runtime. Because the images may be in subfolders, one possibility might be that you will have to parse the xml and do a search and replace to insert folder paths, then assign this xml object.

I suspect that whatever you do, the workflow will be horrendous each time your want to change a gallery. It's equally awkward whether you use HTML or Flash.

Staying with Flash, I would recommend you look at SlideShowPro, which is designed for multiple galleries. With SSP for Flash (their AS2/3 component), you would build your movie and point it to an xml file. If you also bought SSP for Lightroom, you would have an easy way to generate single galleries with their xml files. See this video for how to merge these galleries' xml output into your main movie's xml file.

My own Flash site is based on SSP, but the movie gets its xml from their SSP Director product (hosted myself). This makes uploading new images or galleries little more than a matter of File > Export (the About this site shows the process).

John

 

[MichaelBrown]

I suspected that things could get tricky if I were to dig into the challenge of incorporating the stock lightroom galleries. I looked at Slideshow Pro in more detail than I previously had- it's Flash component seems pretty slick, and it also appears to have alot of potential for modification, while retaining a more streamlined/automated workflow. I'm going to play with the trial and see what its like- Thanks for the advice