Simpleviewer - Anyone use this?

d70girl · Sep 13, 2006

If anyone here has used Simpleviewer to build a flash gallery, can you offer any advice or tips? I'm having the hardest time figuring it out.

Thanks!

dewey · Sep 14, 2006

Good morning,

I started using Simple Viewer about a week ago, and there is some trial and error! I am a bit of programmer, but I have no desire to spend a lot of time building galleries - I'd rather be out shooting.

I have tried Simple Viewer by way of a server side script, by manual labor, and by using desjtop programs... this is the easiest way I have found to use it.

1) Download the SimpleViewer Picasa Template

2) Download Picasa (This is Google's free image editing/organising software.)

3) Install Google Picasa on your machine

4) Copy the file from Step 1 to the Picasa Template folder (usually C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\templates).

5) Launch Picasa, and either let it find your images, or point it to your images

6) Choose the files you want to put in a gallery and go to FOLDER >> Export to Web Page

7) Choose the Simple Viewer Template - follow the options and your gallery is created!

8) Upload ALL of the files in the folder that you specified in step 7 to your website.

You're all done!

If you want to modify the captions of the images you need to edit the gallery.xml file. This is real easy - just right click on the file and choose "open with notepad". You'll easily see where the captions are - and the title of the gallery itself. You can simply change these, save the gallery.xml file and re-upload it to your website. Simpleviewer lists all of the variables on their website.

You can also modify the index.html that simpleviewer generates. You don't need a fancy HTML editor, just right click on the index.html and choose "open with notepad" You will see where you can change the title of the page, and if you want to get fancy the META tags as well.

Just as a note I do not use Picasa to edit photos - I have no experience with how that works. I simply have found Picasa with the simpleviewer template the fastest and most easily modified web gallery software. I can go out and shoot for hours, get home color correct and crop in Photoshop for hours, then make a nice pro gallery for my website in about 5 minutes.

I hope that helps - please let me know if you have any questions!

- Dewey