iView Media Pro : Making A Custom Web Gallery

CHAPTER I: AN OVERVIEW

I want to explain how I use iView Media Pro to create all the customized Web Galleries on this site - but I'm going to have to begin with an overview (how boring).

I have one gallery created for Prints for Sale that have things like Product ID, Mat and Print sizes and cost. How these fields are used to allow users to buy prints from the site and display custom information will be in the last part.

So Here We Go

I have a folder where I keep all images that may end up in a web gallery. I call it, WebImages. The files are all in Tiff format, already at 72 dpi, and in RGB mode. In general I like to make the longest dimension for these files the same as what I expect to show on the web - in my case the longest dimension is usually 600 pixels.

Later, when you create the gallery you can resize them if you need to but I'd just as soon not do any more compression than I need to.

I don't know if there's any real benefit in keeping all the source web files in one folder - it's just the way I started.

Next you need to create Catalog Sets

CATALOG SETS

So here you have my category sets (upper left corner) with "All Prints for Sale" selected.

On the right are the images in this set. You can sort them about twenty different ways, or you can drag and drop them into the order you want. When you save the catalog, this order is saved so you don't need to do it again (unless you really want to).

In the simplest case, once your Category Set is ready, you select MAKE -> HTML GALLERY

This is where you get to chose "A THEME." The theme actually consists of 2 template files that are installed beneath wherever your iView Media Pro application has been installed.

On a PC - they are normally installed beneath the Program Files folder:

There are many options to choose from when you create the gallery, such as how many rows and columns should be on the thumbnail page; whether the jpg that will be created should be scaled to a smaller size, image quality size for the jpg and a few other parameters.

During this phase you will select where the gallery should be created on your hard drive and you can chose to either have iView Media do the ftp upload (this is new in version 3) or you use Dreamweaver or whatever FTP software to upload the html gallery to your site.

The structure of what will be created on your hard drive:

The index files contain the thumbnails that the user clicks on to get to the page with the larger image and other information such as captions, or in my case the button to buy the print.

P7M - you won't have that. That some software I'm using to create the top drop down menus.

Previews contains the thumbnails that are displayed on the index pages.

Expand the Source folder:

The names for the html files are created based on the filename of the original tif source file. The actual large images are in the sub folder: image.

One of the nice things about naming the html pages based on the file filename is that the name remains constant. Some systems I've used named files based on a numbering system. This meant that every time you regenerated the gallery with new files, the number of the html page would change.

Another nice thing in basing it on the file name is that when things do go wrong - let's say during uploading - you can figure out what didn't get uploaded properly.

And finally - each page can stand on it's own. If you would like to send a URL to a particular page - you can do it easily and don't need to figure out what number is what. Also, just as a side note - no frames here. If search engines come across your html file and someone clicks on it - they don't get lost - there will be a link to the index page (let's say index15.htm) that it's associated with.

Now, if you've chosen one of the templates that came with iView Media Pro - then you just need to do the uploading to your web site and you're finished.

In the next chapter I'm going to concentrate on serious customization of the two template files in your theme: Index.htm and Media.htm

PAGE TWO: CUSTOMIZING THE GALLERY