Lightroom Gallery Website Integrator [beta]

[DigitalOxygen.ca]

Not technically a plug-in, but I have a PHP script that I wrote to easily integrate Lightroom galleries into existing websites.
One thing Lightroom galleries of all types (that I have seen) seem to lack are the ability to be easily integrated into existing webpages/websites with designs that are different than that of the Lightroom gallery. As I understand this is largely due to limitations of the Lightroom web gallery engine, but that is another discussion. I find it really breaks the flow of the site when it's designed a specific way and the Lightroom galleries don't really match (different headers/footers, etc). Sure you can manually hack them into the site by modifying the index.html or resource files that are generated or copy and paste the code into your own template, but that's a pain when you create/update galleries regularly.

Anyway it's a rough first cut right now but should be totally usable. Would love it if I could get some volunteers to test it out. I have limited time to support/troubleshoot right now, but wanted to get it out into the wild so I can collect some feedback and make improvements when I get some time.

http://digitaloxygen.ca/development/pageintegrator/

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Interesting idea! I don't have time to test right now, but I hope you find some volunteers.

 

[Sean McCormack]

Matthew Campagna has an autoindex gallery, which also uses PHP to create galleries. One or 2 I've made use his code to make them compliant. Using PHP is certainly a great way of taking the sting out of it!

 

[DigitalOxygen.ca]

Ah, also an interesting approach. I briefly considered looking into that approach too after reading your post, but since I want to make the solution publicly available I would end up breaking Matthew's EULA (http://lr.theturninggate.net/2'1'/'3/end-user-license-agreement/).

 

[Studio2401]

Surely interesting, but couldn't the same be achieved by replacing lightroom html templates and or adding your custom code?
That's how I have done it initially. Only adding the new set to an index remains a manual task then.

 

[DigitalOxygen.ca]

[quote author=Studio24'1 link=topic=9495.msg64158#msg64158 date=127'87857']
Surely interesting, but couldn't the same be achieved by replacing lightroom html templates and or adding your custom code?
That's how I have done it initially. Only adding the new set to an index remains a manual task then.
[/quote]

True, but I think that would have the potential to break some stuff when working with it or previewing it in Lightroom. I had done that at one point too, but I am more familiar with PHP than I am with the stuff inside the templates. Seems to me it could cause work and headache when updating to a new version of the template as well. This would also mean that if you changed your site header or footer you would have to go back and modify the template, re-export all your galleries and re-upload them rather than just modifying the header/footer on the server. Change it once and you're done.

I had previously been doing other things via PHP like modifying the galleries slightly once on the server, for example having a single repository for all the resource files, doing that in Lightroom breaks the preview so there is potential benefits for the server side approach there too.

There are definitely lots of ways to accomplish the same thing. I think the server side way is more flexible than modifying the templates, but haven't explored the template approach enough to know for sure