I’ve been hacking on Lightroom’s web gallery engine in an attempt to get the kind of results I want while retaining the convenience of managing my galleries from within Lightroom. I’ve achieved something I consider a satisfactory first effort:
http://doudoroff.com/photo
This gallery is automatically constructed with a heavily modified version of Lightroom’s default “Lightroom HTML Gallery” engine. Things I did: custom headers and footers, additional navigation (breadcrumbs in the upper-right corner), title and keywords automatically added to the HTML metatags, modified placement of title and caption, modified style sheets, and a bunch of javascript that serves up different sized images based on your display size. None of these things can be accomplished within Lightroom itself. It was a couple days of work for me, although I was learning as I went, and future changes will go quicker.
Basically, a Lightroom web gallery engine is a bundle of Lua (a programming language from Brazil on which Lightroom itself is assembled) scripts, templates (HTML files with sprinklings of Lua), and supporting resources such as graphics files and style sheets. In order to produce a custom engine, you have to have a pretty complete understanding of HTML and CSS, you have to spend a little time learning some Lua syntax (helps if you’re already a programmer), and you have to spend some time with the Lightroom SDK documentation (which isn’t the worst I’ve seen). In other words, it takes a professional software developer or an extraordinarily determined amateur to get over the hump.
Of course, Adobe’s underlying assumption is that the UI in the Web module of Lightroom (all those color pickers, and checkbox options) should provide all the customization you really need. Frankly, I doubt the gallery engines that ship with Lightroom get anywhere near an 80% solution, though. Out of the box, what the Web module really produces is “quick and dirty” web galleries. Moreover, supporting all that UI makes the web engine significantly more complicated than it might otherwise be. You can rip out all those controls (which is what I wound up doing), but some of the complexity remains.
There are a handful of free and commercial third-party web gallery engines out there for Lightroom, although none actually did anything I wanted. Looking ahead to Lightroom 3, I think the new bi-directional export-to-web-service plug-in system (see the new flickr feature) holds a lot of promise, and may render the Web module of Lightroom largely superfluous. If it takes a software developer to get a desirable web gallery out of Lightroom, the developer’s time might be better spent creating a web service instead. I certainly intend to look more in this direction before I invest a lot more time in my custom gallery engine.
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