In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast Terry White shows how to use a Lightroom Web Gallery from The Turning Gate in InDesign to make an Interactive Portfolio for your iPad or Android Tablet.
Grab the Photoswipe Gallery Plug-in that I used in the video here.
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Great tip Terry. I didn’t realise you could do all that in in-design without paying for a subscription to the digital publishing suite. I presume if you wanted to then create a standalone app from the portfolio you would have to pay? But still, great tip.
Thanks so much, Terry! I was just starting to fiddle with making a folio after attending your class on the subject at PSW. I’m also a huge fan of the TTG plug-ins and use them all the time. Now, I’m REALLY excited to go give this a try and combine them.
Great post Terry! Wondering if you have noticed how slow and clunky the TTG Highslide Gallery plug-in works on LR4? The folks at Turning Gate don’t seem to be talking about a fix our upgrade to make the plug-in usable with LR4??
I used the new CE2 versions all weekend (Horizon Galleries) and didn’t notice any slowness at all in LR 4.1 RC. Next I’ll be working with Pages CE2, Auto Index, etc.
I’ll echo what Terry said. I was working with both CE2 Horizon and CE2 Client Response Gallery (both one of the release candidates and the final version) all weekend with no issues.
Rendering in all TTG galleries is a tad slower in Lr4 because the rendering engine changed inside Lightroom. Matthew has addressed that in his blog (www.theturninggate.net) and there really isn’t much more he can do beyond what he has done.
Ya, I’m using a version older than the CE2. Since the plug-ins are so cheap to purchase I’ll just make the upgrade and give that a shot. Thanks guys!
This is super cool. A use for my plugins that I definitely had not considered, and I love to see the plugins being used in new and exciting ways.
In response to comments:
The only plugin for which speed may be an issue for some users is TTG CE2 Pages, but there are two versions. The standard version has all of the features; TTG CE2 Pages Lite removes some of the most infrequently used features for speed gains of 30-50%. And it’s fairly easy to move work between the two by hacking saved templates if you want to use the Lite version, then finish the job with standard version features. Users have access to both versions.
As Richard says, though, rendering and rendering speed are dependent upon Lightroom. The only way I can make things faster is to gut features, which is exactly what I’ve done to create the Lite version of the Pages plugin.
Apart from that, the only thing I have to add to Terry’s EXCELLENT video is that users should be mindful of PHP-based features when doing this. Enabling options like password protection, Facebook Open Graph Protocol, the PHPlugins extensibility features, and a few others will cause pages to export as PHP rather than HTML, which I imagine would not run in this context, as PHP requires a web server. Likewise, you would not be able to use my gallery index plugins — Auto Index and Pages — via this InDesign technique, as they also require PHP.
Most of the gallery’s features are available to the HTML document, though, so this should not be a big problem for users.
From InDesign, you’ll want to be able to import index.html; if you find that you have an index.php file instead, you will probably want to revisit your gallery configuration in Lightroom. And I would imagine this to be the first step in troubleshooting should you find your results different than what Terry shows above.
One other thought of note that might save someone else the pain of my past hour:
The current version of the folio producer tools for InDesign CS5 are V1.9.1. These are incompatible with the current version of the free content viewer for iOS (I can’t speak for Android). This article from Adobe
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/digitalpubsuite/using/WS67cb9e293e2f1f60-21ba9a4512e5e5e0b8d-7ffe.html
explains how to get version 1.8 of the folio producer tools which DO work with the current version of the viewer for iOS.
Once I downgraded, everything worked beautifully and exactly as Terry described in the video here.
Terry: thank you again for doing this. My wife can’t figure out why I’m so excited but I’m bouncing around like a kid at Christmas playing with this. 🙂
Terry, I purchased & installed the iPad app, but it is nowhere to be found on my iPad. Any suggestions?
1. swipe all the way to the right and search for it.
2. if it doesn’t come up in the search, check your App Store for Purchases and see if it’s installed or not.
thanks very much for writing! It’s not there when I swipe all the way to the right. But, in the App store “Learn Adobe Creative Suite with Terry White” is listed as “installed”. And when I plug my iPad into my Mac, and view its contents in iTunes, Learn Adobe Creative Suite with Terry White isn’t shown there either.
Terry, have you found a combination of settings that will cause the images to display full size, i.e. without a black border. I’m sure there has to be a knob some place, but I’m dipped if I have found it yet.
Best way to get images full-size is to export images at iPad screen-resolution. If targeting the iPad 2, then you should set long dimensions for 1024; if targeting the new iPad, set your long dimensions to 2048.
Photoswipe includes zooming/scaling options, but it’s better to export your images at the appropriate size rather than to rely on gallery scaling.
Hi Matthew,
I figured that that’s how I should be exporting the images but I don’t see a way, within the panels for Photoswipe to set the long-edge dimension the way I would in the Lightroom export dialog. A nudge/shove/bludgeon in the right general direction would be greatly appreciated!
Hi Terry,
I stumbled across your video on Youtub and loved it, cant wait to give it a go! I was hoping someone might be able to explain where you ‘uploaded’ the files to? Is it a custom domain? An adobe server? Do you havw to pay for this service. I cant seem to get any information about it and I havent yet upgraded to CS5.5 to give it a try myself.
It is an Adobe Server and it’s free to create personal Folios.