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TTG FlashNifties Gallery

Current version 1.2

TTG Flash Nifties Gallery integrates FlashNifties.com's XML Flash Gallery Component into the Adobe Lightroom Web module.

TTG FlashNifties Gallery 1.2

Download | Sample Gallery | Forum Thread | Installation

FlashNifties.com: Documentation | Demos

Why FlashNifties?

I found FlashNifties' XML Flash Gallery Component while wandering the Internet and liked it well enough to create a LR adaptation. This flash-based gallery is highly customizable, and includes support for links for individual images, meaning that users can include links to PayPal sites, Flickr pages, etc.

By default, the gallery includes support for the Caption, Headline (for link text) and IPTC Subject Code fields (for link URL). The Title field actually isn't used. You can change which fields you use by Editing the Custom settings in the Image Info pane.

Changelog

v1.2 (2008-06-30)
Updated SWF component to latest version (new parameters not yet implemented).
General updates and refinements.
HTML-version gallery discontinued.
v1.13 (2007-07-30)
A caption bug introduced in 1.1.2 finally seems to have been squished for good, and the gallery has been tested in both Mac and Windows versions of Lightroom with positive results. Thanks where thanks are due: to Andy Rahn for setting me in the right direction, and to Joe Capra and John Moore for support and testing. Without them, I'd probably still be wracking my brains trying to sort this out.
v1.1.2 (2007-07-28)
Fixed a bug that caused all images to have the same caption and link.
v1.1.1 (2007-07-27)
Minor bug fix.
v1.1 (2007-07-25)
Added a Flash version of the template, which should preview properly in LR for Windows.
v1.0.2 (2007-07-20)
Bug fixes.
v1.0.1 (2007-07-19)
Fixed a display bug in Firefox for Mac OS X.
v1.0 (2007-07-03)
Initial release.

Additional Notes

This gallery is built upon FlashNifties.com's XML Flash Gallery Component 2.0 free version. The regular version costs $20, and does not include the link back to the FlashNifties website.

Make a Donation

If you enjoy my work and would like to pay for it, I accept donations via PayPal. Donations are wholly unnecessary, but would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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Comment »

Jenn
4 July 07 / permalink

I’m assuming you’re back in Korea now. Sorry, I missed you during your visit—everything has been hectic to say the least with everyone getting knocked up around me (I’d say the water in Augusta County is potent) and birthdays and work and what nots. I promise to keep checking in! Maybe next time you see me, I’ll have a little junior—double Jenn entertainment—now isn’t that something.

Alfonso
7 July 07 / permalink

Your work is the best I saw for lightroom.
Thanks a lot and continue with the great job

JJCE
20 July 07 / permalink

Hi Matthew,

Can you tell me how I incorporate the ‘paid for’ flashnifities component into your gallery so I don’t get the link to their site ?

Thanks

Matthew
20 July 07 / permalink

All you should need to do is copy the licensed version of the SWF file into the gallery folder, overwriting the free version of the file.

joe
20 July 07 / permalink

your work is amazing. i haven’t seen this in any lightroom gallery but is it possible to have any part of the headder be a graphic? i’d like to stash my logo in the upper right hand corner of the gallery just to keep it consistent with what else is on my web site. again, all great stuff you have here.

Matthew
20 July 07 / permalink

Of course! The reason you haven’t seen it in a gallery is simply because the templates are designed to be usable by all; logo graphics are very individualized, so they don’t really fit into a public release.

To get your graphic in the image, just drop the image into the gallery folder. Then open the gallery.xml file and add a line for the graphic, so that LR knows to include it.

Finally, open the transformer.xslt file and add your graphic to the HTML for the page(s). The code for the index.html file is at the bottom.

Good luck!

Jan
24 July 07 / permalink

Great work! Is there a chance that you might develop something similar for ‘Monoslideshow’?

Matthew
24 July 07 / permalink

Hi Jan,

I’d never heard of Monoslideshow, but googled it and it looks really slick. Because there’s no free version, I’ll probably backburner it for a while, but will definitely put it on my consideration list for future projects.

Mathew WIth One T
28 July 07 / permalink

The flash gallery seems to have a bug even though it can be previewed in windows now. It seems that every photo will have the caption of the first photo and that’s it. Is there any way this can be fixed?

Matthew
28 July 07 / permalink

Mathew,
Thanks for tipping me off to the problem. It’s fixed in v1.1.2.

Cheers,
Matthew With Two T’s :P

Mathew WIth One T
29 July 07 / permalink

Hey Matthew,

I hate to do this to you again, but version 1.1.2 seems to be completely nonfunctional for me. The preview no longer works (shows a single button with no photo in it) and it renders the same. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks again, – Mathew

Matthew
30 July 07 / permalink

Mathew,
I’ve identified the problem, but haven’t come up with a solution yet. It’s to do with the code that calls in the captions. The problem only affects the Windows version of LR, not the Mac. Might actually be a problem with the Windows LR itself. :\

Jean-Pierre Morin
1 August 07 / permalink

Thanks for creating a site and providing templates for those searching to break out of the rather dull templates packaged with Lightroom.

I really like the look and feel of Sample Gallery B for FlashNifties, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how you did it. Could you shed some light on this for me?

Matthew
1 August 07 / permalink

Hi Jean-Pierre,

I’d be happy to share. Try the following settings:

Thumbnail Layout – a 2×6 grid
Thumbnail Width & Height – 80
Thumbs X – 10
Thumbs Y – 50
Large X – 300
Large Y – 50
Corner Radius – 40
Auto Show First Image – Enabled
Disable Thumbs – Disabled

That should give you the general layout. From there, you can tweak the captions, fonts, etc. to your liking.

Cheers,
Matthew

Benjamin C. Mooney
11 August 07 / permalink

I just want to say thanks for all the hard work you put into these great galleries and the fact that you share these free of charge. Thanks you so much.

Perry Leung
13 August 07 / permalink

Matthew u really are the best!!! i have been thinking of my online ablum using LR but never got anywhere… untill i see yr tutorial.

i have a qs, after i create a few different ablum… how can i join them together? like let them chose from my list of ablum? eg. macro, protrait , landscape…etc

joe
13 August 07 / permalink

ok the first part of what you said was super easy. the second not so much. my pure code skills have evaporated over the years. is it possible for you to post the bit of code that i need to make it generate the logo on the index.html page?

Matthew
13 August 07 / permalink

Perry,

Try my TTG Gallery Index, TTG MediaBox Index or TTG Greybox Index templates.

MonoSlideshow also supports multiple albums, though you’ll have to do some manual coding to make it happen (export multiple galleries, then copy and paste the album and image code into a single XML file). TTG MonoSlideshow Gallery can help you get started, though.

If none of those solutions work, then I’m afraid you’ll have to come up with something on your own. My templates are the only things out there for Lightroom that allow any sort of gallery indexing.

Matthew
13 August 07 / permalink

Joe,

Open the transformer.xml file and head to the bottom, then work your way up slowly. You should be able to find div id=header pretty easily. You should place your img tag in there. You might need to set some CSS as well, but I can’t tell you what it ought to be as I don’t know how you want things to look.

Arnoud
20 August 07 / permalink

I’ve extracted this very nice template into my lightroom dir. I can select it in Lightroom and publish it.

But than I get sample A, how do I choose/setup sample gallery B?

Matthew
20 August 07 / permalink

Arnoud,

You need to dial in the appropriate settings. Try this.

Thomas K
22 August 07 / permalink

As a Lightroom virgin, I may be giving up too soon – but then again I’m not sure if I’m asking an easy or difficult question.

I’ve tried repeatedly to set different captions to the images and fail repeatedly. For some reason or other I end up with the same caption on everything, but then again – I might be trying to milk an ox. Any pointers would be greatly appriciated.

Thomas K
22 August 07 / permalink

Figured out the META-function after a little googling :D

manu
24 August 07 / permalink

Well, got pass the Selection Gallery, simple gallery, stack gallery (have to move images from the bin that LR makes, place them into a Folder (which you must create) Images.
Anyway, got the stack to work.
Now, this flash gallery only displays, one rounded thumbnail without a photo within it, and that is it.

There is no viewing within Lightroom 1.0, export it, can only view as mentioned above, Firefox / Safari. I use a Mac osx.

any ideas…will go down the list of your templates.
best regards,
manu

Matthew
24 August 07 / permalink

Manu,

With all of the Flash galleries, you need to use Lightroom 1.1.

LR 1.0 doesn’t support the xmlTransformer.xslt file, which basically runs the whole gallery.

Manu
30 August 07 / permalink

you are right.
now its time to have fun.

Well, it was just a matter of updating LR 1.0 to 1.1,
now all is working fine.
Mac OSX.

thx.

style-templates
15 January 08 / permalink

Your work is the best I saw for lightroom.
Thanks a lot and continue with the great job

Rakesh
13 February 08 / permalink

I tried TTG FlashNifties – Sample Gallery A today. They are Great but when used they also display a symbol advertising for “Free XML Gallery for Flash Nifties”. Is there any way we can get rid of it.

Thanks a heap,

regards
Rakesh

Matthew
13 February 08 / permalink

Rakesh,

You can get rid of the advert by purchasing the Pro version of the gallery from FlashNifties.com. I think it’s $20.

Cheers,
Matt

Andreas
11 March 08 / permalink

Hello Matthew,

this is definitely the best work for Lightroom i saw! Keep on going!
Can you tell me by the way how i can use the new features (music, title) from the updated data.xml version in Feb?

Cheers,

Andy

Matthew
11 March 08 / permalink

Hi Andy,

I wasn’t aware the gallery had been updated. I’ll have to check it out and update the gallery when I find the time.

Thanks,
Matt

sysedit
4 May 08 / permalink

Hi Matthew,
First, thanks for the good work, that’s really amazing !

I need your help ;). I would like to integrate the gallery in a blog (dotclear). I can integrate HTML, scripts a.s.o, so this should not be an issue.
My problem is that I would like to have a gallery for each post.
My structure is like this:
/
+ /blog
+ /blog/index.php
+ /ttg
+ /ttg/2008-05-04

I copy the gallery in the /ttg/date directory, I customize the html so it loads the different .js/.swf in the /ttg/date directory.
This works, but no images are shown.
I also updated the data.xml file so it points to /ttg/2008-05-04/images for the images, but nothing appears.

I assume the .swf needs the data.xml in the current directory, but this would prevent me for having a gallery for each post as the current directory is always the blog root.

-> is my statement ok ? If no, any idea what can be wrong ? if yes, is there a way to indicate the data.xml location ?

Thanks for any help and again, thanks for your work !

Matthew
5 May 08 / permalink

Try adding this to your Javascript reference:

fo.addParam(“base”, “/ttg/2008-05-04/”);

It tells the SWF where to find it’s resources. Because it’s being called into a page at a new location, it’s probably seeking its resources at the page location, rather than in the dated folder. To see the code used in context, look at the source on this page. It’s a different type of gallery, but the code should be similar enough.

sysedit
8 May 08 / permalink

Hello,
Thanks for the answer.

Actually, your tip doesn’t work, but knowing what to search I went to FlashNifties web site and finally found the solution:

so.addVariable(“file_to_load”, “/ttg/2008-05-04/data.xml”);

is the javascript call to add.

Thanks again for taking time to answer and for the work, and greetings from France !

motti
6 June 08 / permalink

Hi Mathe’

First of all, great work and a great gallery. Exactly what I was looking for.

After creating a gallery I wanted to add it to my web page. So I:
1. copied the java/script line and put it just before the </head> tag (I placed it just after another java/script line that refers to another small flash I have in this page.
2. I changes the path to src=“nifty_gallery/flashdetect.js” (since this gallery is in a sub-folder)
3. Copied all the code for the flash movie and pasted in where I wanted it to be.
4. Changes the path to the ‘loader (var so = new SWFObject(“nifty_gallery/xmlGallery.swf”)
5. Since I have a div called ‘flashcontent’ I changed it to ‘flashcontent_1’ and made sure to change it also here: so.write(“flashcontent_1”);

when opening the page I see one square showing up and a small question mark at the top right corner. That’s it.

Anything I do wrong?

Thank you,
Motti

Stephanie
30 June 08 / permalink

I posted a comment somewhere on here, but lost track of where it was posted. My friend stumbled across it and said you replied that you didn’t know which gallery I was using. So, I’m going to try this again :)

I downloaded the flashnifties gallery and am using the HTML version of it. I set it up, got all the images and what not (previewed it in a brower as I saw that you mentioned it wouldn’t have the automatic preview). Everything looked good to go. And then when I try and access the page from the internet, I only see the title bar, page numbers 01-06, and one circle that flashes white. None of the thumbnails or large images are loading.

The file structure is:
Bin -images —images —thumb —-filenames.jpg
Content -logo.png
data.xml
flashdetect.js
gallery.css
iepngremoval.css
index.html
pngfix.js
source.xml
xmlGallery.swf

Is there something I’m missing/ forgetting to do? I somewhat understand coding, but am still very new to desgining/ building/ uploading websites, which is why I was drawn to your site. I like that your LG galleries incorporate images galleries and can easily be worked in Lightroom.

I don’t understand why my design will preview fine in a browser window, but does not function properly when accessing from the internet. Help, please.

:)

Thanks!!!!

Matthew
30 June 08 / permalink

Crap. I haven’t looked at this gallery in ages upon ages, especially the HTML verison (which I’ve been meaning to obsolete). At this point, I think I have no idea why it wouldn’t be displaying properly. But the first test I’d want to run is for you to attempt publishing a gallery with the Flash version and see whether that works. Try that and get back to me, please.

Stephanie
30 June 08 / permalink

If I had my ‘druthers I’d use the Flash version instead of the HTML. I like the title bar at the top though :) Will try that and let you know. (Same friend that I mentioned before said she did post one with the HTML and it worked fine). We’ll see how mine goes tomorrow! ;)

Matthew
30 June 08 / permalink

If the Flash version works for you, then I’ll try to add support for FlashNifties gallery to TTG Stage, as that’s the direction my Flash galleries are moving in anyway. Honestly, I should have done it by now.

Matthew
30 June 08 / permalink

Stephanie,

I’ve updated both the FlashNifties gallery (Flash version, which is now the only version) and TTG Stage (use it to get your header). There’s also a new sample gallery you can check out from the link in the article, above.

Stephanie
1 July 08 / permalink

Thanks for doing that! Even happier that I stumbled on your site. I’m currently in works with those two. I’ll let you know how it goes. Also, two things, well maybe three.

1. On the TTG stage, the identity plate has a blue-greyish color as the background. When I viewed the sample I saw it. After going to a different page and coming back, it would be black to blend with the background. It also shows the blue-greyish background in the LR preview window. Is there a way to change that?

2. When different pages of thumbnails are created, their links are automatically numbered in sequence (the nav. in the upper left had corner.) Is there a way to change that to text?

3. Make sure to update under the TTG Stage that it now supports FlashNifties gallery! ;)

Thanks again!! :)

Matthew
1 July 08 / permalink

Stephanie,

1. Upgrade your web browser.

2. No. That’s just the way the FlashNifties gallery does it. It’s nothing to do with me, and all to do with the folks over at www.flashnifties.com.

3. Will do! Thanks!

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