Bluefire Blog

Did you know that you can modify the menus and menu items in the Flash galleries generated by Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Bridge CS3? Well, you can, and soon you can do even cooler things with those menus. You can add whole new menus that change styles on the fly (changing things like colors and layouts), menus that load a whole different set of images into the gallery, or menus with links to other html pages. You can even create menu items that do multiple things at once (e.g. load a new set of images AND change the style). To see what I'm talking about, check out this sample gallery.

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To be clear, this is not using the actual gallery.swf that Lightroom or Bridge exports when you create a gallery. Rather, it is a new modified version of that gallery.swf that we put together for our readers. We just submitted the code that enables these features to the Adobe Media Gallery open source project and it should be available to you soon once our submission has been integrated into main by the administrators (I'll put up a new post when it is). To use this yourself, you'll need to download the new gallery.swf from the open source site and swap it out with the one found in your exported galleries.

To actually add menus like this you'll need to open the "localText.xml" file found in the resources/localization folder of your exported gallery with a text editor. You simply type in new menu and menu item names, define the event for each menu item, save it, and Walla! it is that easy.

... Well, almost. If you want to have menus that load new sets of images, you'll of course need to use Lightroom or Bridge to export a gallery for that new set. For this particular pupose, the important files you'll be generating when you do that is the "group" XML file (which is basically a list of images with associated metadata and file paths) and the image renditions themselves. When you add your menu to your "main" gallery, you'll be putting a "changeGallery" event, and a pointer to the desired group.xml file into the new menu items.

Note that when you add a link an html page to a menu item, it does not work when you test it on your local machine. The gallery has to be viewed online for that to work.

When making style changes via menus, you can either load a whole new "style.xml" file, or simply pass a single style variable to the gallery (as illustrated in the "color" menu in the sample gallery) Refer to our other blog posts on style settings to see what the individual style settings paramters are and their supported values - the post on advanced mode is a good place for that.

This may sound complex but it really isn't. If you can write basic HTML, you can do this. The best way to get started is to right click on this link and save it to disk. It is the localText.xml file used in the sample gallery. If nothing else, you can surely copy and paste the script for the menu that opens other html pages, paste it into your own localText.xml file and change the names and url's.

Sorry to tease you with a preview before it is officially available, but this was too exciting to wait.