Web gallery tools : Part 2 – SlideShowPro Director
SlideshowPro Director offers an inexpensive and elegant solution for image galleries on the Web. Since I started using it last year, I have seen its use proliferated in many different formats all over the Web, from artist portfolios to lodging virtual tours.
SSP Director has to be installed and used on a server, and it requires Flash. It is available as a component for Flash and gallery extension for Lightroom. [There is a standalone version that eliminates the need for owning Flash, described below.] If you have a Web site hosted on a server and know how to get access to it for uploading and installing Director (or as a first step, the free test software that determines if the full product will work on your server), or if your Web designer/Webmaster can guide you through the process, the installation is pretty straightforward.
Getting the Flash software is the hard part because it is so expensive. But once you’ve got the look you want, and upload the Flash files (a .swf and .html file), then you are good to go. That means you can get someone with the Flash software or your Web designer to create the flash “engine” for you.
You’ll need two SSP products:
- SlideShowPro for Flash ($29.00): Photo gallery and slideshow component for Flash MX 2004, Flash 8 and Flash CS3.
- SlideShowPro Director ($29.00):Content management system for SlideShowPro. Downloadable version for one domain.
If you do have Flash, you just download, unzip, and install the Flash component (Flash should not be open when you do this) by clicking on the unzipped .mxp file. Launch Flash, create a new document and select Actionscript 2.0 as the type, open the Components panel, and drag the SlideShowPro component to the stage. I like to do this with SSP Director already installed on the server and populated with images so that I have images to view in realtime as I work on the Flash file. The process for configuring all of the parameters for SlideShowPro in the Flash Component Inspector is a bit tricky, but the SSP docs and Web site cover it well. The connective tissue between the Flash files you need to create and the SSP Director gallery or album on the Web is the pathname to the SSP URL where the gallery or album resides. You can get that info in Director when you select an album or gallery. Then you (or your Web designer) just need to enter that URL in the Component Inspector and publish the Flash files.
Installing Director on the server, and setting up galleries and albums, are also described in the product documentation. Rather than belabor all of that here, I just want to say that I’ve had non-technical clients who have done well with the Flash and Director combo with very little instruction from me. I have created the Flash files for them, uploaded the files, installed Director on their servers, and then given them a brief tour of Director and the clients are off and running and able to keep their own portfolios updated.
See the SlideShowPro Web site for examples of beautiful slide shows that you can create, as well as more descriptions of how the parameters were set in the Flash Component Inspector to achieve the results shown. The nice thing is, if you do have Flash and a gallery set up on the server and you have provided Flash with the gallery’s URL, you can see how changing the parameters in the Component Inspector affects things because Flash is communicating with the server as you go. It is worth your while to look at the parameters below each of the examples so you can get an idea of how to achieve the look you want.
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A Standalone version of SlideShowPro is available, but it comes with a pre-built .swf file (the engine that drives the slideshow) and you can’t easily customize parameters as you would with a native .fla file in Flash. Any changes you want to make have to be done in an XML file, so you’d have to be pretty comfortable with XML to go this route. The standalone version comes as part of the download for SlideShowPro for Flash.