Playing with Lightroom a bit more (and a sunny day) has resulted in a new Flash-based photo gallery (Stourhead Gallery – needs flash player). At the moment these are the basic pictures taken earlier today with no editing. It took about 5 minutes to copy the files off the SD-Card, into Lightroom, create the gallery and upload. The first and last stages were the slowest.
Now, I think I should point out that although I like Lightroom (a lot), I have no intention of buying this when the beta runs out. As a free tool it is fantastic. I am not sure I would be willing to pay for this functionality though.
If I was a professional photographer with no IT Skills it may be worth while, but given the ease with which you can create similar sites (flash or otherwise), it strikes me this is a shrinking market. Adobe may have been better giving this away and charging for support.
Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 is out now and the Flash galleries are WAY better than in the Beta. No more scroll bars on images, Yes! -The gallery now automatically swaps to a different image size rendition to best fit the browser window. The thumbnail scrollbars look way better too. It is still not free but they do at least give you a 30 day free trial. If you are into the Flash galleries, you might want to check out the blog posts on how to further customize the Lightroom Flash galleries by editing the XML files at http://blog.bluefire.tv
FYI, Photoshop Elements 5 has very similar Flash gallery export feature (more like the Lightroom Beta version though) and it is less than a 3rd the cost of Lightroom. So if you don’t need the RAW workflow stuff, that app is worth looking at.
Thanks for the info. I am not sure I will go to the lengths of buying Lightroom but I may give the free trial a go.