Creating a Web Gallery in Lightroom

Recently, I’ve been asked to set up a few web galleries from a recent shoot, and I thought that I would show you how easy it is to create galleries from within Lightroom.

To do this tutorial, you will need the following

1) Space on a website to upload your photos to

And

2) the FTP login details for that site. The login details can be found by contacting your web hosting company

With that out of the way, let’s begin by selecting the images we would like to appear in our gallery. I have chosen a selection of Portraits and added them to a quick collection

Once you have selected all your images into a collection, select the Web Module along the right of the Lightroom top tab

As you can see above, the centre of the screen shows a preview of my chosen web gallery. On the left tab there are a selection of templates to choose from, this one is called Warm Day. At the moment, only a single image of our chosen portraits is showing in the gallery. To select all of our portraits, click an image in the bottom tab and Press cmd+A (Win Ctrl+A) to select all the images.

 

At this point, I am able to interact with the web gallery preview, choosing images from the thumbnails etc. One thing I notice is that the images appear the order selected, and not in the order I want them on my gallery. The solution is to deselect all the images (cmd+D or Ctrl+D) and then drag and drop the images in the lower most tab

Once you are happy with the order of the photos, reselect all the photos

at the top on my preview screen, I can see headings such as Site Title, Contact and My Photographs.. These can be customised using the Site Info panel in the right tab..

 

You can choose which titles to fill in, in this case I didn’t want to add a collection title so I deleted the contents of that box.

My images in this example already have watermarks & sharpening applied, so I unticked those boxes in the output settings panel.

At this stage, I may change my mind as to the design of the gallery… not a problem, just choose a different template and everything updates. in the example above I’ve change the Layout style from a Flash gallery to one of the free flash modules that comes with Lightroom, the Airtight Postcard Viewer.

I am now happy with how my gallery looks and am ready to upload it to my web space.

At this point we need to set up the FTP login details so that Lightroom can export the gallery to our website.

 

In this example I didn’t choose a server path in the FTP settings, but created a subfolder called TS_Portraits. This will create a web gallery on my site with the address zooming-feet.com/TS_Portraits

All that is left to do is to click the Upload button at the bottom of the right panel and… wait

Depending how many images you have selected, how large the original image is and your internet speed, this part may take some time!

Finally, when all is uploaded you can go to the internet and admire your handywork..

One final tip is that you can save your gallery as a Web Gallery template, allowing you to come back and modify your gallery at will

 

That’s it for this week, I hope that you find the helpful. As always, if you have any questions or comments.. please feel free to do so below.

Cheers

Scot