Megazine Lightroom Gallery Template (Kludge)

[hanoman]

I wrote this tutorial mainly for myself, because it is in no way a complete Lightroom Template.
But it will help me, to generate new books of my website www.pixel-werke.de in the near or farther future.

It generates
   - the <page> ... </page> part for the chosen pictures,
   - the small picture versions for the book and
   - large versions with maxDimensons of 2880 pixels (I read anywhere in the forum, that that would be the
     largest size flash can handle.)

Unzip (unrar) the archive megazine.lrwebengine.rar, and save it into the "Web Galleries" directory in your Lightroom settings folder:
   - Mac OS X: /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries
   - Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries
   - Windows Vista: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries
   - German Windows Vista: C:\Benutzer\[username]\Anwendungsdaten\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries\
   
Edit the the two files xmlTransformer.xslt and gallery.xml eg. with Notepad++. There are comments to guide you. Relaunch Lightroom.
The Megazine2 Flip-Book Gallery should now be visible in the Web module. The meaning of the Megazine Web module parameters:
   - Page Title: is transformed to the <img> gallery parameter
   - Caption: is transformed to the <img> title parameter for each image
   - Image Size and Quality: the size and jpeg compression quality of the large images.
   
To change the maxDimensions of the small pictures, you have to edit the galleryMaker.xml file. See paragraph <sizes>...<size>...</size></sizes>.
Enjoy!

[hnuecke]

Thank you very much for your contribution! Sounds interesting, and I'll give it a try soon.
I also am a Lghtroom fan and "heavy user" ;-)

I will report my experience here... later

[hnuecke]

I followed your description and it worked immediately, even with Lightroom3 Beta!
Already very helpful, but here some more "ideas" ;-)

1. Adding kind of standard <book> tag with the needed and most used plugins already declared, including the pagewidth definition (suggestion: same as one image to start with); and the closing </book> tag
2. Adding the remaining "framework", i.e. the <chapter> lines and  perhaps the dtd declaration.

With that a complete mz3 file could be created, that should work immediately.
Changes can then be either dann in the MZ3 file directly (prefered). If soem basic adjustments are desired (to define a personal standard), the xmltransformer.xslt and gallerymaker.xml could be adjusted.

I have no idea if all that could be done with just the .xslt skript or if another wrapping skript is needed...
Curious to get your thought on that!

Anyhow: very interesting approach; at least for Lightroom users ;-)

BTW: I consider creating a tutorial about MegaZine3 for PSD-Tutorials.de (a German website), one of my favorite websites about photoshop, lightroom, indesign ... with valuable use cases and tutorials.
Would you be interested seeing your skript included in such an example? Or create something together with me? Making the Lightroom Template key focus of such tutorial would also be a better fit for that website and kind of tutorials presented...
Just another idea .....

[hanoman]

It should be possible to add the whole framework of the megazine.mz3 to the xslt-file. I didn't do that,
because i have to mix the pictures of two Lightroom catalogues, flames and photos, to one book.
If you change the gallerymaker.xml, you can integrate variables like book dimensions in the Lightroom gallery interface.
But that needs for my part deeper study of the Lightroom mechanisms.
It were good news to read that the template was functioning in LR3, because i am not sure about Adobe's future strategy
in respect of web templates.
I am too a member of PSD-Tutorials. I appreciate your publishing the (enriched) template. But for the readers of that forum
you should also consider the work of Paul van Roekel (www.paulvanroekel.nl), who made some templates for Picasa. I started with modifying one of his templates exporting the pictures from Lightroom and importing them in Picasa. For your convenience i add the relevant files from <program folder>\google\picasa3\web\templates\megazine3. These are a kludge of a kludge, but perhaps a starting point.
Please send pm (in german for convenience sake), if you think i can help you.