Poor web facilities in Aperture 3

Question

Level 1

39 points

Poor web facilities in Aperture 3

Hi all,

I've been using both Aperture and Lightroom since they first appeared. For a long time I prefered Aperture for my personal projects and Lightroom for my professional work. Since I upgraded my desktop mac to a 2,93 GHz intel Core i7 model with 8 GB memory I've been using Aperture all the way.

The only thing that makes me go back to Lightroom is the Web module. I tend to send a web gallery to my clients showing a selection of the pictures I made and for that I've been using the Lightroom HTML-gallery theme since ages. It has a neat and clean design and it is easy to customize. I feel Aperture can't deliver to the same level.

So nowadays my workflow consists of importing my pictures into Aperture, doing all of the post processing in Aperture and the NIK Suite (I hope NIK soon wil be a non destructive brick in Aperture) and export them as Jpegs. I then import these Jpegs into Lightroom just for creating a web gallery that I then post on my webspace and send the client the link to the gallery.

As one can imagine I sure would like to drop the Lightroom part and create my webpages directly in Aperture. Does anyone of you have an idea where I can find / how I can create a Aperture Theme that's very simular to the Lightroom HTML-gallery theme?

Cheers,

Ivan

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on May 10, 2011 5:00 PM

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Answer 1

mrhooper

Level 1

65 points

May 11, 2011 2:13 AM in response to Canticleer

Great question!

Wish I had the great answer, well at least a simple one.

If you know HTML CSS stuff and all that you might be able to do it.

I played around managed by trial and error to get some of the text, the colors and a couple of header photos to work on a theme. But in the end, I resigned myself to the obvious. It is just plain hard work.

Here is where the action is.

In Applications select Aperture.app.

Right click and take Show package contents.

Contents>Resources>Web Themes.

My advice at that point is to copy one of the current ones and then move it to another directory and rename it and begin the process if it the sort of thing you want to do.

I am not a web engineer and most of it I played about with until it looked about right.

It is strange because there is a little tiff file that is in the web themes that pops up when you select your new theme, but the tiff will show the old theme. Scary ah.

A bit of a search on the web should find others who have braved these waters. try Customising Aperture Web Galleries or something like that.

Hope it works,

DJ

If you want a commecial solution then go to Jumsoft.com as they have heaps of really useful pages to add into AP3. we currently use one of them.

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Answer 2

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,260 points

May 11, 2011 5:06 AM in response to Canticleer

As I'm not familar with this aspect of Lightroom, it would help if you posted a link to a gallery in this theme.

Regards

TD

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Answer 3

Canticleer Author

Level 1

39 points

May 11, 2011 7:38 AM in response to Yer_Man

Thank you both for your reply.

No DJ, I'm afraid I'm not familiar to HTML and CSS stuff. Thanks for pointing me to where the action is, as you say, but I guess you are right about the hard work and the great amount of time it would take to come to a satisfactory result. Time that I don"t have right now.

You also say you currently use a Jumsoft theme (now sold by Graphic Node for $ 49). I somewhere read that these themes can give you a hard time and are not always correctly rendered by MS Internet Explorer. Do you have any experience backing this up? Would it be possible to send me a link where I can see one of your Jumsoft galleries?

TD, here you can see the kind of Lightroom html gallery I use. It's a selection of portraits to illustrate a magazine interview. You first have a page with a thumbnail overview and some basic info (including a link to one of my websites and an email link), and secondly you have a close-up page for each individual photo. That's all I need. Most of all I like the no-nonsense approach.

Best regards,

Ivan

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Answer 4

BenB

Level 6

12,097 points

May 11, 2011 8:27 AM in response to Canticleer

I have a MobileMe account, and it works great with Aperture. I can make it privte, with multiple user names & passwords if needed, or public, accessable from anywhere, works for our studio great.

But Apertures web pages are very easily customizable. What exactly are you looking for?

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Answer 5

May 11, 2011 9:27 AM in response to Canticleer

Have you explored the Aperture themes? It appears that either the Proof or Stock themes would pretty much give you what you are looking for.

The only thing missing as far as I can see would be adding a clickable email address and a link back to your site. These may be doable in Aperture haven't had a chance to really use the web pages. But even if it's not adding these in to the html page would be fairly simple.

The way the html pages are laid out makes them very easy to customize. It seems that they had that in mind when they created the themes.

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Answer 6

Canticleer Author

Level 1

39 points

May 11, 2011 11:04 AM in response to Frank Caggiano

Thanks again for your replies. Yes I have explored the Aperture themes and I find them rather rudimentary and limited in their possibilities. Maybe they're easy to customize using html but I'm affraid I'm just a simple photographer, used to pushing buttons and turning dials. I know nothing about html or css and I don't have the time to get familiar with it (given that I have the intellectual capabilities, which I doubt).

Don't get me wrong, I like Aperture very much. As I wrote in my original post, I use it daily and almost exclusively nowadays. The good thing about Lightroom though is that I don't need to get acquainted with html or css. There are loads of web themes for Lightroom with easy accessible customizations. That doesn't mean I'm gonna keep on buying upgrades for the Adobe application.

To cut the long story short, these are the things I like in the Lightroom html gallery and I would like to reproduce in Aperture (there's a link to one of my galleries in my second post in this thread).

General

Easy adjustable color palette and fonts

Link to my webpage

Link to my email

Thumbnail page

Each thumbnail, both landscape and portrait, is centered in its own cell, horizontally and vertically

The cells are separated from each other only by a thin line

Thumbnail have a dropshadow

Detail page

The width of the landscape pictures is not restricted to the width of the portrait pictures, thus both landscape and portrait pictures are 'big'. The width of the individual cell remains the same.

I appreciate the effort you all took for replying to my post and I'm looking forward to more suggestions.

Cheers,

Ivan

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Answer 7

May 11, 2011 12:51 PM in response to Canticleer

You're correct that the themes in Aperture are sparse. The two I pointed out seemed to be closest to the web page you posted the link to.

It does seem surprising that even the simplest customization (background color, making text into links) is lacking. Hopefully in a future release this things will be included.

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Answer 8

mrhooper

Level 1

65 points

May 11, 2011 6:19 PM in response to Canticleer

Hi,

I don't have a jumsoft page up at the moment, at least not one that is not customer only, if i get a chance I''ll put up the modified jumsoft we used for some banter among a photo group.

I also found this today, while on the prowl for other info,

he doesn't tell all, but does give some useful example screen dumps.

http://www.jonroemer.com/blog/2008/05/aperture-2-custom-web-pages/

DJ

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Answer 9

Canticleer Author

Level 1

39 points

May 14, 2011 11:50 AM in response to mrhooper

Thans for the link DJ. A little disappointing though to see that the author wrote his article almost 3 years ago, way back in the time of Aperture 2.x, and Apple hasn't changed a thing since. Maybe in the next upgrade.

For the time being I guess I'll keep on using Lightroom for my customer oriented web galleries.

Still interested in the jumsoft theme though, if you get a chance.

Cheers,

Ivan

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Answer 10

mrhooper

Level 1

65 points

May 16, 2011 3:43 AM in response to Canticleer

Hi there,

You can link to this. Suppose I can do this in a ap forum

Linkhttp://homepage.mac.com/dw_jenkins/Canticller/

But I will take it down after 22 May 2011.

This is the modified Jumsoft.

Didn't say it was great, just that it can be done.

I ended up using the little grey boxes under each image for discussion notes and other useless info.

And I suppose there was no reason to change the basic format in AP3, after all most of Apple stuff seems to be CSS things.

DJ

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