WEB - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 320

As you move your mouse over the list of
installed templates, you can see them in the
Preview panel at the top let ; see Figure 7-5.
Also, the bottom let of the preview displays
either “ht ml” or an “ f ” for Flash.

7

Click on the name of a template to load it
into the main preview area. When you click
a template, Lightroom will also will switch to
the Layout Style from which that template was
made. Conversely, if you click a Layout Style,
Lightroom will load the default template for
that style.

Figure 7-5

Flash layouts can of er more visual appeal and customization of the design elements,
transitions between photos, etc. h e main disadvantage of a Flash gallery is that,
although it may look nice, it's not well suited for search engine indexing. h is is
due to the programming code being embedded within the Flash i le that displays
the photos. Your photo metadata, including keywords and captions, is not visible
to search engines. Secondarily, some people still resist using Flash, or have browser
problems with Flash versions. Finally, in most cases, Flash galleries will take longer
to load than ht ml galleries. Besides these performance issues, I also think most
Flash designs are generally too elaborate, and can easily distract from the photos
themselves.

ht ml galleries are very “search engine friendly”: a search engine crawling the
Web can i nd your ht ml pages and read through their content, allowing the
search engine to index the pages and the photos themselves. If you have keywords
embedded in your photos, the search engines will read them and index your
photos accordingly. Not so with Flash galleries. h e potential drawback to pure
ht ml photo galleries is that you might not like the way they look, and you can't
always include fancy transitions like fades, wipes, etc. However, I think this is
outweighed by the speed and compatibility that straight ht ml of ers. If you want
to have your photos found by people searching the Web, and you want a simple,
clean layout, stick with ht ml. (I almost always prefer ht ml galleries over Flash; the
exceptions may be situations where I don't care if the gallery is publicly visible, and
I want to make a nice presentation for a specii c client. In these cases, a Flash gallery
may have more impact.)

Third-party layouts
h ere is a growing number of third-party Web gallery layouts available for
Lightroom. You can greatly expand your range of options by installing additional
Layout Styles. I've listed some of the best below, in no particular order: