Steve Cherrier

I’ve been doing some research on flash templates that I could use for a new portfolio site I’m doing for my photography (coming soon!), and I came across a product called SlideShowPro. It comes in a Flash and Lightroom variety. Since I’ve been using Lightroom so much, and because it was only $25, I decided to take the plunge and pick the product up.

It’s a great product, especially if you use Lightroom, and it’s very easy to use, but also very flexible with how you create your online slideshows.

I actually found a cool minimalist, auto-play enabled slideshow template that a fellow created to use on Myspace. It was quite wide so I modified it and tweaked it a bit more to create my own “Sideshow” template that can be used on blogs and other web sites that need a smaller footprint. Also most of my photos are portrait sized (taller than wider), so this fit the bill. Check the Sideshow out on the right and hit the jump for more information on downloading the template, installing and inserting code to make it work.

First, download the file here:

Sideshow – A SideShowPro for Lightroom Template
http://steve.cherrier.org/downloads/SideshowLRTemplate.zip

Requirements:
Adobe Lightroom 1.x
SlideShowPro 1.x

Installation instructions:
Open the Zip file. On Mac OSX, double click on the “Sideshow (240×16) for Portraits.lrtemplate” to install it. For all systems, right click on User Templates in left panel of the Web Module and choose “Import..” from the contextual menu. Use the File Browser to go to where the file unzipped and choose it. Remember, you must have SlideShowPro installed for this to work.

Embedding in a web page:
Now to get this to work on your blog or personal site, you’ll need to embed the following code on your site. I use mine on a Wordpress sidebar:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="240"
width="160" base="." data="http://yourdomain.com/directory/loader.swf">
<param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" />
<param name="movie" value="http://yourdomain.com/directory/loader.swf" />
<param name="flashvars" value="xmlDataPath=yourdomain.com/directory/images.xml" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="base" value=".">
</object>

(Be sure to change the yourdomain.com to your own URL, and if it the files are in a subdirectory, enter the directory name or path to the file as well.)Enjoy! Hope you find this helpful.