Lightroom - custom web page or Zenfolio

[monions]

Hi,

This is not directly related to LR2 so I may have posted in the wrong section.

I am looking to host my images online and am deciding between a custom web site or something like Zenfolio.

I already have an unrelated web site so know how to create a website, but this is what is pushing me towards Zenfolio as I do not want the effect of creating new pages, thumbnail images etc. With Zenfolio it is very easy to upload and the 'magic' does the rest.

So my question is, does the Web module in LR2 work well in this respect for making it easy to upload new images to a custom website or is it still easier to use Zenfolio or the like. What are your experiences??

Thanks,
Mark.

 

[Sean McCormack]

I'm in the process of a series of tutorials on making custom galleries in Lightroom. The first one is up on Lightroom-News.com.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Mark, not to step over Sean's tutorial, which looks to be the foundation step of a very informative series. I think to answer your direct question, one common complaint about LR developed web galleries is that there's no 'automagic' way to incrementally edit them once uploaded. LR's method is more or less to re-upload the whole thing for even minor changes. In other words, it sure would be nice to tweak/update an already uploaded gallery, and hit the "Make it So" button. Unfortunately LR is not that slick yet.

If you know your way around a website, and can do FTP, and depending on the gallery type, it's not that hard to make the incremental changes with a minimum of re-uploads, etc. But LR doesn't figure it out for you.

I don't use Zenfolio or SmugMug, so I can't testify to the 'easy' revision/update capability there, but from the things I've seen and read, I'd speculate that using LR alone to do that kind of thing would be a little more troublesome for the non-web savvy user.

Are you familiar with Jeffrey Friedl's export plug-ins for several sharing sites, here:
http://regex.info/blog/2''8-'7-29/891