Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
My personal website at http://www.barbbowman.net has been my photography gallery site for quite a few years. The last time I redesigned it, I used Adobe Muse (while it was in beta) to easily use Jquery for galleries and lightbox effects. It’s been in need of an overhaul for a while, especially since functionality was sometimes degraded using IE 10/11 with some of Adobe’s cloud based javascript hosting. Buying into Creative Cloud to use the released version of Muse to see if things had improved was not my cup of team.
The included HTML Gallery template in Lightroom 5 is too simplistic for my tastes and I started looking around for web gallery plugins. I viewed a lot of demos and used some trials where available. The one that seemed the most useful to me was Turning Gates TTG CE3 Gallery plugin but I couldn’t find a trial, so I spent a few hours looking at demos. Based on what I saw, the $25 price seemed like a bargain.
The initial learning curve on this plugin took a couple of hours, and I certainly haven’t explored or used all the features, but once I had figured out what I wanted and started saving user templates, actually building the site (V1, usuable but not the final) from already saved collections was easy and fast. And it was far better in V1 form than the one created in Adobe Muse, so it is now online. It’s hosted on a Microsoft IIS Sharepoint public facing server, so while there are some neat looking auto indexing features, they aren’t available to me since they rely on PHP.
The site now works beautifully with touch enabled computers and devices. The galleries are swipable. Even on a non touch computer, you can use a mouse to drag swipe through each gallery (or use the nav arrows). Included in the functionality is a mobile version.
When entering the site with my iPhone, a fast loading screen (left, below) is displayed. Selecting the left icon displays the menu (right, below). Selecting the icon on the right displays the page, like the two above.
Once a specific Gallery is selected (such as Alive) you can view either portrait or landscape and can swipe through the current gallery. The “X” returns to the previous screen.
I’m thrilled with this Lightroom plugin and the first version of my new personal site. And it can only get better as I work on V.next.