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#1 2013-07-18 06:22:13

gregscott
Member
Registered: 2013-07-18
Posts: 3

Potential customer wants "the perfect template"

I want a lightroom template for rebuilding my personal website.
The MAIN thing I want is an interface that works the way I want. I've got some specific wants/needs:
A. Three+ levels of view:
0. Index of galleries, perhaps in a heirarchy, with plenty of "hooks" for custom links. (I could do this myself, though)
1. Gallery Index grid/table of thumbnails, with configurable thumbnail size.
2. Normal Full size view, with configurable size in gallery.
3. True Full Resolution size view. It should allow zoom in/out, panning through a huge image, and gallery or image level definition of a watermark for the high resolution image. I presume this might be a java or flash applet or viewer of some sort. Autopan option for large panoramas would be a very nice plus.

Ideally, navigation should allow you to go to the next or previous image or gallery, depending on the level of view, and up to a higher level in the various levels of view.

2. Ability to use (at a minimum) Title, description, and ideally selected metadata in the template, in html form, so each image appears on a page with its own specific text/keywords, so that search engines can find my images optimally.

3. Shopping cart for the site and print ordering per image at a commercial vendor, or preferably more than one commercial vendor so we aren't locked into a single solution. In it's most ideal form a metadata could be loaded with info for the widget/link(or whatever) so we can stay on our personal website, but order via a POD site with easy return to our website

4. Keyword filters so users can search for image keywords, title, description, and metadata values.

5. Open architecture for template customization. (Optional, but would be very nice!)

6. I'd like to export images in three versions: thumb, medium with optional watermark, full-res-with-watermark.

I know that's asking a lot. Most of the templates are definitely lacking in the bolded items. This web template technology is pretty old, and it's time that somebody offered all this in a single template. They're pretty basic for a photographer's needs.

As far as customization goes, I'm very old school. I know SQL,  elementary HTML, and some really old languages like powerbuilder, foxpro, and Clipper. I've written code generators in all three, but I it would take me a lot of time to do that for Lightroom, since the database does not appear easy to reverse engineer. And I still wouldn't have a workable cart and POD connection... I guess if I have to learn JS, I could... (Other tech to learn?)

For an example to comprehend my concerns, I have a lot of very high aspect ratio panoramas. Like this one:
Painted Desert Panorama 1/3x1/3 of full resolution. Click in your browser to see it bigger.
http://www.gregscott.com/pano/20110503_ … m1_web.jpg

Last edited by gregscott (2013-07-18 06:36:35)

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#2 2013-07-18 13:58:25

Matthew
Administrator
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: 2012-09-24
Posts: 5,795
Website

Re: Potential customer wants "the perfect template"

0.

TTG CE3 Pages and Auto Index comprise our indexing solution. You can use either, or both in tandem. Nesting instances of Auto Index allows you to create an organizational structure as deep as you like.

Our PHPlugins extensibility architecture allows you to implementation customizations and additional content with a high degree of flexibility.

1.

See above. You can set custom thumbnails, or just let the index handle thumbnailing for you so that you don't need to think about it. Some layouts lend themselves to one approach more than the other.

2.

Of course you can view large-size images.

3.

If you export an image very big -- bigger than will fit on the screen -- it will be downscaled to fit the space. In such cases, images can then be "zoomed" to actual size for viewing at native resolution.

See panoramic support in CE3 Stage for another option.
http://ce3.theturninggate.net/galleries … a-partial/

At this point, your bullet numbering breaks down ... so we're back to 2?

2.

Lots of options for putting metadata on the page. Two slots under each thumbnail, another two slots in the large image view. Managable from the Image Info pane in Lightroom, which allows you to combine any IPTC, EXIF or other metadata into strings for output.

3.

We offer a proprietary, untethered shopping cart system as an add-on for our galleries. You can accept payments online or not, receive orders, then manually send them off to the lab(s) of your choosing. We plan to release a new version of our shopping cart system in August.

4.

Our galleries are not database-driven, and therefore do not support search.

5.

See #1.

6.

Galleries natively support export of thumbnails and large version, watermark optional. You can also setup download buttons for each image, and supply higher-resolution versions via separate export, or -- if using TTG CE3 Publisher to manage your galleries -- publisher can export all three renditions for you.


Matt

The Turning Gate, http://theturninggate.net

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#3 2013-07-18 19:05:34

gregscott
Member
Registered: 2013-07-18
Posts: 3

Re: Potential customer wants "the perfect template"

Cool! That's more than I hoped for, to be sure. I guess I'll go ahead and jump in. No doubt I'll have some challenges in front of me, but hopefully, they will be a lot of fun. Thank you.

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