Rrg. Upgraded yesterday from Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 to 5.0. Various and sundry features made it look like the cat’s meow, etc.
Alas, the system no longer generates HTML/JPG-based web galleries, but Shockwave-Flash-style galleries. Worse, the number of gallery options has been sharply reduced — there are some spiffy-flashy-fancy galleries, but a simple, straightforward thumbnails-and-photo option is still done in Flash and the design options are significantly reduced. Plus the pictures published are quite a bit smaller.
Oddly enough, “HTML Photo Gallery” still shows up in the help files, but the option doesn’t seem to be there by that name.
Poking around for templates online runs into a few problems.
- PSE 5 is relatively new. A lot of stuff for PSE 4 and 3, which seems no longer valid, is out there.
- A lot of what I’m looking for, and a lot of the Googleable content, is hidden within eleventy-gazillion scrapbookers.
- A lot of template stuff (probably because of the scrapbooking aspect) (a) is actually deathly ugly, and (b) costs money for the privilege.
Continuing to pound at it, though. I’m sure there are ways to do what I want.
Okay, there is a way to get around the size thang — after creating the gallery, do the File/Export, specify the size, and replace the files in the “large” directory. Okay, that works.
Now, I need to find/figure where the template files are stored so I can tweak the XML to include the functionality I want in the gallery:
1. Home link back to my photo page.
2. Include tags on the screen (that’s a “nice to”).
3. Include some other verbiage on the screen.
Mutter mutter mutter …
Found the files (under Documents & Settings / All Users). Now need to figure out how the XML files fit to the template files fit to create the galleries.
No helping the Flash stuff, alas. Nobody’s particularly happy about that. Mutter.
The more I ponder this, the more really unhappy I am with Adobe’s direction here.
1. It makes viewing the gallery dependent on folks having Shockwave/Flash. Going forward, it means future computers have to be able to read the SWF files generated by PSE5 today. I trust that HTML will render in ten years; I don’t trust that SWF will render.
2. SWF doesn’t index in Google, making it unsearchable.
3. If someone (friend, family) sees a picture they like, they can’t right-click save it. They have to screen capture it. Bleah. If I were professional photographer, that might be what I want to prevent easy downloading of my catelog. I’m not. I intend folks to take what they want.
4. I’ve still not been successful in threading through the XML to make the gallery do what I want, the whole SWF thing aside.
I deeply regret having upgraded from PSE4. Bleah.
Question is, what to do now.