The Photoshop Phanatic: Photoshop Basics

Creating a Web Photo Gallery

In this final installment, we'll explore creating photo galleries to display your digital images. A photo gallery is a great way to share images of vacations or to share precious moments with family members that live far away. Galleries also have educational value, they can present image data in a way that is centralized and easy to compare, side by side. The only thing your viewers would need to view your creations would be a Web Browser and the Flash plug-in (only for the Flash gallery templates). Having said that, let's jump right in and create your first photo gallery.

Creating Your First Web Photo Gallery

• Open Photoshop.
• Choose File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery.
• Choose a gallery template from the Styles drop-down menu. You will see a preview for the template you have chosen on the right hand side of the dialog box.
• Choose the Source Images for your gallery from the Use menu.

Here you have two options, Selected Images from Adobe Bridge or Folder.

Selected Images From Adobe Bridge will use the images you selected in the Bridge before you opened the Web Photo Gallery dialog box. The Folder option uses images from folders you select using the Browse (Windows) or Choose (Mac OS) buttons. If you wish to include any folders within the folders you have selected, simply select Include All Subfolders to include those images.

• For this demo, we will use the Folder option. Select a folder on your computer that contains the images you wish to make into a photo gallery.
  
  
• Click the Destination button, and then select the folder you wish to store the images and HTML pages for your gallery, next click OK (Windows) or Choose (Mac OS).
  
  
• Select formatting options for the web gallery. Choose from the Options menu to display each set of options. For this demo, we will keep the default General option selected.
  
  
• Click the OK button. Photoshop creates the necessary HTML and JPEG files in the folder you selected as your destination.

If you navigate out to the folder in which your photo gallery was created, you will see that the following files are contained:

• A home page for your gallery named index.htm or index.html. Open this file in any web browser to preview your gallery.
• JPEG images inside an images subfolder.
• HTML pages inside a pages subfolder.
• JPEG thumbnail images inside a thumbnails subfolder.

Experiment with this technique and see what you can do. Happy Photoshopping!