I’m sure many Inside Aperture viewers have already taken advantage of the Web Gallery features in Aperture. I finally decided to take the time (three minutes) to create one, and it reinforces for me, the value of this amazing program.
How can you make more money with Aperture? One way is to get your work out there to people who pay to use it. Outputting images to the web is a great way to communicate privately or publicly; with you in control.
From my recent trip to Rwanda, I wanted to get some work from a memorial I visited there, out to some editors I thought would be interested. The heart wrenching Murambi Memorial contains the mummified bones of hundreds of the almost one million victims of the Genocide in 1994.
It could not have been easier for me to place these images into a Web Gallery, and I had the selects up and online in minutes.
I just selected the images I wanted to post, and clicked the New Web Gallery button. Then I added some words, quickly changed the order a bit by dragging and dropping, changed the theme to “Stock Black” and was ready to click “Publish to .Mac” and that’s it. Photos are up and on the web and ready for editors to choose images they are interested in. I just email the URL, or link it from a web page.
If you want to make a gallery from scratch, make sure nothing is selected, then click the New Web Gallery button and Aperture creates an empty gallery that you simply drag images into from any project or album.
I chose quality over load speed, so I used the “High Quality Setting” when prompted, since I know the people viewing my work will have high-speed connections. You can easily customize how the page(s) will look, number of columns and rows, shape and size of the images as well.
As many ways as you edit your selects, using ratings, albums and smart albums, you can also use these functions to create Web Galleries.
In future posts I will delve deeper into the possibilities. But in the meantime, if you’ve yet to use this powerful feature in Aperture, you now know how easy it can be. It’s a fast and professional way to query editors with new work.
I like the themes it provides and inevitably, the feature set and customizability will improve with future versions.
Zak, in some ways you're right. When I contribute to this blog, I figure I'm posting for professional and serious amateurs who appreciate the diversity of work being produced, even work that's hard to look at. When you click on the sample photo, you are taken to the web gallery to view the work. But I admit, after your comment I went back to the post and realized it may have been a mistake to use this particular set of pictures in this context. But as mentioned, it was my first go with Web Galleries and it happened to be with this body of work. I never meant to offend.
I didn't mean to imply a conspiracy! However, it is both an obvious feature and easy to implement, so Apple obviously had their own reasons for not including it.
Also, I would like to respectfully object to your choice of sample image for this post. I think it's great that you did that work in Rwanda, and I think it IS important for people to see it to raise consciousness. Context is important, however, and I personally think that those genocide victims deserve a little more respect than to have their bodies used as a mere sample image on a blog to illustrate the nifty functions of a computer program.
I REALLY appreciate this kind of useful entry, an Aperture feature I need but haven't gotten around to figuring out how to swing it!
I use these as self contained proofing sites. I have a bigger problem with the web galleries changing the files names of the images in the process.
Clients right click and save the images for position then request image#2 as a final. I then have to dance between the web gallery and my masters to figure out which file that is!
you could alsi put the whole aperture gallery in an iframe or an div container on a blank page, and place the back-link above it.
Zak, You make a very good point, a "return to home page" link is simple and important. But before we go crazy with conspiracy theories, let's see if they add this to the next version.
Aperture IS great for making individual pages. It's basically useless for complete sites, however. Why didn't Apple include functionality like a simple link called "Return to Home Page" or something like that? Did the iWeb people threaten to throw a fit?
If I link to an Aperture page from my home page, the only way to create a link BACK is to hack the source file. Sorry. This is one of the most egregious mis-judgments in an otherwise great program. I've scoured the web, and the people who use this web function are few and far between, I think, because Apple chose to intentionally cripple it.