You may wish to create an image gallery to share slides or PowerPoint presentations with your students. Some students may not have PowerPoint on their home computers, but they can view a web-based image gallery with any web browser.
Creating A PowerPoint Gallery Using Photoshop's Web Gallery Tool
Click here to download a PDF of these instructions.
Why Use the Photoshop Web Gallery Tool:
The Web Gallery Tool is a very quick way to get a reasonably attractive frame-based image gallery together. You may use it to convert PowerPoint slides into a web-based presentation. At its most basic, the Tool only requires that you have a folder of images somewhere on your workstation, and that you're able to understand the exporting options of the Tool's interface. There is no technical requirement to format the images (in Photoshop or some other application) before they're made into a Web Gallery.
Exporting PowerPoint Slides As Images:
- Launch the PowerPoint program and open the original file.
- Choose "File -> Save As"
- In the "Save As" dialogue box, specify where you want the folder that stores the exported files to be saved. (Each slide will be saved as a separate image - Slide1.JPG, Slide2.JPG, ... Slide10.JPG, and PowerPoint creates a new folder with the same name as your original file to store these image files.) Select either jpg or JPG for "format" if you're using MAC and for "file type" if you're using PC.
- Click the "Save" button to export the slides.
- You'll be prompted to either export "Every Slide" or "Current Slide Only."
Special Note on Slide Numbering: To ensure proper sequencing, rename Slide1.JPG to Slide01.JPG, Slide2.JPG to Slide02.JPG, etc. Or else, Slide1.JPG will be followed by Slide10.JPG rather than Slide2.JPG.
Using the Photoshop Web Gallery Tool:
- Launch Photoshop 8 on either Mac or PC.
- Choose "File -> Automate -> Web Photo Gallery... " which will bring up the screen below:
1) Choose a “Style” for the gallery from the drop-down menu (Horizontal Gray and Horizontal Neutral are common choices). You can see style previews on the right. Entering something in the “Email:” field will put the address on every page of the Gallery, so this is usually better left blank.
2) For “Source Images,” tell Photoshop where to find your folder of images (select using Browse button). For the “Destination…” tell Photoshop where to put its series of exported files. It’s best to create a new destination folder and set that folder as the Destination. (Note: Photoshop does not create a folder automatically as Powerpoint does for the JPG slides.) If you need to redo the export for whatever reason, feel free to re-use the same folder. Photoshop will overwrite the folder contents with each new export.
3) For “Options,” you will need to check the settings for drop-down menu options “General” (pictured above), “Banner,” and “Larger Images.” The remaining Options: “Thumbnails,” “Custom Colors,” and “Security Options” generally do not require any tinkering, although they are worth checking.
- Under "General" choose whether the exported file extension will be ".htm" or ".html." It makes no difference.
- Under the next menu option “Banner,” give your Gallery a title in the “Site Name” field. Blank out any fields you don’t want displayed on every gallery page, such as the date.
- Under “Large Images” specify how you want Photoshop to resize the original images (if necessary). You can customize the size or choose a setting:
For Ecampus web galleries, make images at least 450 pixels (“Large” setting) and use “High” or “Maximum” for the JPEG quality. Uncheck all the title options, unless you want them to appear on each page.
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There are also "Thumbnails," "Custom Colors" and "Security" options. You probably won't need to change these on a regular basis, but they are worth checking. (For example, the Horizontal Gray style needs a darker background for the Banner, which can be changed in “Custom Colors.”)
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Finally, click on "OK" to start the export. The default browser will launch automatically to show you the newly created Gallery.
Additional Notes:
- After creating your Gallery, you can make minor changes in the HTML pages using Dreamweaver or another HTML editor. The web galleries use frames (the web gallery’s index.html is usually a frameset), style sheets and sometimes javascript, so be careful if you are less familiar with how this code works.
- On some of the Gallery styles there is a cute timer effect which changes the image every 10 seconds. The timer is simply an HTML meta tag called "Refresh" and it just contains a value for the refresh (10) and a URL to refresh to. Again, this information is contained on every HTML page in the Gallery. There is no funky Javascript controlling the timer.
- To make mass HTML changes to the pages of the Gallery, you can do a global find-and-replace in Dreamweaver or Arachnophilia.
Contributed by gt. Last updated October 18, 2005 by mg.