This week I’m going to show you how you can create an online image gallery in only a few minutes. Aperture makes this so easy that you can probably create a gallery in less time than it takes to upload it to your server.
Last week while on my way to the MacWorld Expo I made a side trip to a place that is world famous in the geeky world of railroad fanatics (RailFans). The Tehachapi Loop is located (not too surprisingly) in Tehachapi California and it is a section of railroad that climbs through the mountains and at one point makes a fairly tight loop and crosses over itself (also known as a helix) as a means gaining altitude over a short distance. Railfans come from all over to see this place and take train pictures. About 23 years ago my good friend Carlos and I rented a Cessna 172 and I made the pilgrimage to train mecca and spent the day taking pictures … so I thought after 23 years maybe it was time to revisit the site.
Now that I’ve made the return trip to Tehachapi and I’m back home I want to share the photo with my old friend Carlos. So, what better way than to create a web gallery and just send him a link to it.
So, lets get started. Here are the simple steps to creating a web gallery.
1. Click on the library or album that contains the images you want to be in your web gallery.
2. Select the images you want in the web gallery (click on one and then command click the others)
3. While the images are selected control-click (or right click) on one of them and select “New From Selection…” and “Web Gallery” (See image 1 below).
4. At this point you are presented with a new web gallery (See image 2 below). You could actually stop right here and click one of the buttons in the lower right hand corner that say “Export Web Pages..” or “Publish to .Mac..” and be done. However there are a few things you should do first. First I like to change from the default theme to the “Stock Black” theme because I just think it looks cooler. Also you should change the “YOUR SITE TITLE” and “Your site subtitle” text to something a little more descriptive. You might also want to click the tags button a the top (looks like a little tag with a “T” on it) and see what you page looks like more or less info under each photo. For my example gallery I’m going to go with no tags since the information I want to display will be on the photo detail page … and well get to that in just a second. (See image 3 below)
At this point you’ve been working hard at this gallery for almost 2 whole minutes … do not despair, you are almost done :)
5. In the lower left hand corner click on the little detail page thumbnail and the main display will change to show you what your image detail page will look like. The detail page is what the viewer will see when he or she clicks on a thumbnail on the main gallery page. (See image 4 below)
6. Now that you are seeing the image detail page you can select what type of tags you want displayed. For my image detail page I selected EXIF - Expanded. While on this page you might be tempted to change the text above the image, but be warned if you do that it will change the text at the top of all the pages, this text is not unique to this page.
That’s it … you are done. Now all you have to do is publish this gallery to your .Mac account or export the pages and upload them yourself to your web server.
To see the gallery online please click here
Images (Click to enlarge)
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
Until next time,
Keep shooting.
Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography
One major feature that is lacking is to add a watermark to the images you are exporting to your gallery... unless I am missing something, there is no way to set this option like there is for the regular export options.
:-(
I want to create a whole website using Aperture and its webgalleries for ease and timesaving. An iWeb integration would be great to replace the existing horrible iWeb picture galleries. Lacking that I have used GoLive and iframes to make my site. (still under construction...!) But GoLive is bug ridden and not smooth to work with.
Does anyone have ideas for easy integration of Aperture webgalleries into a website?
I have tried the search and replace method, but its to much of a hassle...
i personally find Aperture takes a rather long time to produce the web pages. A bit longer than what it takes to upload them!
Don't get me wrong, I love the templates and the flexibilty.
A very useful customisation trick is to add a unique word, like "emailtag", then once the gallery is exported do a simple search on "emailtag" and replace with the html:
LEFT BRACKETa href="mailto:youremail@yourdomain.com">LEFT BRACKETfont color="grey">Fred FlintstoneLEFT BRACKET/font>LEFT BRACKET/a>
For the above to post correctly i substituted the symbol "<" wherever you see "LEFT BRACKET" - HTML syntax being cleverer than me in this post !
Now you get an email loopback from your gallery. This trick can also me used to add a clickable logo to the top, but this is more tricky to space correctly. Post Aperture feedback to let Apple know more flexibility is needed here.
Tim,
The first image in the gallery was tonemapped with PhotoMatix Pro HDR software. Yes, it's quite different than the others, but I kind of like it.
Umm...the variation in the train color seems to be greater than expected for shoot under the same lighting conditions. (Gallery Image 1 at 1:14 and Image 5 just 17 minutes earlier) What happened?
I guess what I liked about galerie was I could code the .css files in the catalogue templates and to do whatever I liked. As well there are a wide variety of templates that people make available and you can set up comment section for the catalogue which lets you keep track of who is saying what.
I don't own aperture but for the needs I had which focused on sharing children's art work from around the world
www.childrensglobalarts.ca
this seemed a good solution.
Too bad it doesn't work out of aperture, though.
cheers,
tm
Tim,
Thanks for the tip... however according to thier website "This program generates media gallery web pages from iPhoto, GraphicConverter, iView MediaPro, Extensis Portfolio 7 or from any set of pictures and/or QuickTime media files."
... No mention of Aperture, so it's of little use to someone with thier images in Aperture unless you want to export them first, an unnecesary extra step when Aperture already does it all from inside the program.
Galerie is a free, supported and very versatile online catalogue creation application.
http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/galerie.htm
thought you might want to check it out.