Baffled at first that how is it possible that normal html web gallery can be broken and now showing up normal jpeg-pictures distorted way, I wondered how normal jpegs can be shown distorted in normal web browser in the year 2009? I remember on the early 1990, when the first WWW-browsers came out and the my first web-site had photos as gifs in it, those times there was lots of problems with photos and pictures on the websites. But how on earth almost 17 years later this can happen?
Lightroom html gallery showed black colours distorted on Internet Explorer 8, but everything was fine on Firefox 3.5. I had been happily using Lightroom web galleries for a year and never had problem before. I checked out the html-code on Adobe Lightroom 2.4 generated web-pages and there was some weird java-script code added, and some weird java-script code especially targeted to Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7.
For awhile Lightroom had been prompting me that there is a update available, Adobe Lightroom 2.5. I thought maybe it has a fix to deal with this my issue and straight away installed the new version of Lightroom. Generated and checked the web gallery again: no luck. Same distortions, same html-code generated. I realised I needed to take a deeper look how my installation of Adobe Lightroom 2.5 is using the Lightroom-engine to generate that web gallerie. It was straight forward task and just by looking the Lightroom engine-file, which is normal text-file with some scripting syntax, it was obvious that this file needed to be fixed. Off to go googling for the fix: no luck. Seemed that nobody else had been affected by this and nobody had done fixes for default html gallery. I did a couple of quick and dirty fixes for script by myself but results was as bad as earlier. Script needed to be studied thoroughly and I really had no time for testing and coding.
I needed a new html-based web gallery module for my Adobe Lightroom. Did googling again and a couple of promising hits emerged. I was happy, that two good ones, TTG Highslide Gallery (using nice js-script Highslide) and SlideShowPro for Lightroom (using mainly flash) had demo-versions which could be used to test web-engines. I tested both and both were a pretty solid packages. Both Lightroom engines has good amount of options to be tweaked, so you can get exactly look and feel you like. Both can be tweaked eye-candy. Both did had no trouble on my favourite web browsers, Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8. Seemed like even match between.
SlideShowPro for Lightroom trial version 1.4.6 did though have one glitch: it was advertised that slideshow photos can be downloaded as normal jpegs. It did not have that option on trial version anywhere. I sent email for SlideShowPro support and they replied that they changed version on page to new one with this particular option included. Seems that it is now version 1.4.9 on their page. I can not confirm has this issue been resolved, because their update for trial version came a day too late for me. But their support was prompt, props for that.
As in hurry TTG Highslide Gallery convinced me with giving all the needed funtionality I needed so I bought the license for further testing. I have to mention that if you are considering to buy new html web gallery module for Adobe Lightroom 2, TTG Highslide Gallery needs additional license for commercial website usage from Highslide. TTG Highslide Gallery appeared to be a robust package and I hope my clients enjoy using it in the future.
Update:
I have been using SlideShowPro version 1.4.9 now for a couple of weeks and I’m getting a more and more fond of it. The advertised jpeg-download option works as promised. SlideShowPro is a good flash-based gallery for showing your photos and I highly recommend it for Lightroom 2!
2009-10-01 Lightroom 2 default html gallery problem with IE8
