I used countries, you can use whatever you have handy. You don’t need to go as far as actually publishing them so don’t worry about that, just find a set of photos to think about publishing. So, go ahead and pick some photos to publish to the web. Fantastic if you only ever publish one gallery, not so hot if you want to publish more than one. If you don’t save the gallery, what happens is that when you pick another source folder or collection, the settings stay in place. Each country had it’s own collection, a different title and subtitle and keywords and so on. In my case I was splitting photos up into separate galleries per country and hand-picking the photos in each collection. So how do I use this wondrous technology? Sadly it’s only a static collection, not a Smart Collection, but even so it’s still very useful indeed. Lightroom will take all the photos you have on the filmstrip and add them to a static collection, and remember all the settings you have in the Web Gallery like titles, colours and export location.
So anyway, it turns out that the magic “Create Saved Web Gallery” button does exactly what I wanted. Incredibly flexible, powerful ways of slicing and dicing your photo collection… Basically you can make your own sets of photos that are based on your choices, not on where they’re stored on disk.
So, what does this do? Well, y’know the wonderful abilities of Collections and Smart Collections? No? Go read the article if not. Take a look above the preview display in the Web Module and you’ll see this:
As ever, Lightroom comes to the rescue with a little button I’d noticed but paid no attention to because it didn’t look important. Oh, Lightroom (said I), why have you forsaken me in my hour of being a bit narked at doing things I spent the previous hour doing too? The “Duh” Moment Typically only to find I’d missed something three galleries ago and had to do it again, y’know what it’s like when you’re running through a long list of similar things whilst in a bit of a huff. So, after doing that a few dozen times, I got heartily fed up of re-typing the site title, subtitle, Google Analytics data and various other things that varied between each collection I exported. That was until I wrote the Map-based web exporter, which obviously meant lots and lots of re-publishing web galleries during testing and more lots and lots of re-publishing my own, typically about 20 minutes after re-publishing them the last time and 17 minutes after finding the cause of the bad display on page 3. Yes, I published a few photos online (at if you’re interested), but not very often and it was easy enough that I’d not really thought about streamlining it. OK, I admit it, I didn’t really pay much attention to Lightroom’s Web module until recently.
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