I’ve been testing the new Publisher plug-in from The Turning Gate for the last few weeks, and last week the release version was made available. You can read what I’ve previously written about it here.

I gotta say that I’m completely amazed at how well this works and how easy it is to update galleries with new pictures, completely change a gallery’s layout by just selecting a different template, and moving galleries around.

If I need to change some descriptive text, I just make the change in the Publisher’s Edit Album dialog, click the Edit button and the changes are made on the server.

And with the latest update to TTG CE2 AutoIndex, I can now create Album Sets, which are exactly what you’d think, sets of albums. In practice, it works just like the AutoIndex: as a way to categorize and organize your galleries.

As I’ve written previously, the Album templates are created with TTG CE2 Highslide Gallery, which is the only gallery that will work with the Publisher at the moment. The others are scheduled for updates.

So if you organize your galleries into categories like “landscapes”, “close ups”, and “portraits”, you can create Album Sets for each of these. You can then create Albums inside the Album Set. Or if you want to further organize, you can create Album Sets inside of Album Sets.

You can see this in action on a test site I created. The site was made using TTG CE2 Pages and the Galleries section is managed entirely with the Publisher using Album Sets and Albums.

What’s really great about using Publisher to manage your galleries is that it’s so easy to add more images. Previously, to add images you needed to re-export the gallery from Lightroom’s Web Module and upload. Now you just add images to the Album in the Library Module, mark them for publication and click Publish.

And what if you decide you need to rearrange your galleries on the server? Just move them in the Lightroom Publish Services. Let’s say you have an album of Hoh Rainforest shots that are in the Forests Album Set but you now want them in a National Parks Album Set you’ve created. No problem. Just drag the album from one set to the other from within Lightroom’s Publisher Services. The change will be mirrored on the server. How cool is that?

TTG CE2 Publisher is constantly improving too. Right now, metadata like file names and captions cannot be display on gallery thumbnails or large images. But that’s in the pipeline. It is however compatible with Google Maps, the TTG Cart, Fotomoto e-commerce integration, and password protection.

How easy is all this to set up? It is just a little complicated and there are very specific directions you need to follow. Lightroom Publishing involves a Publishing Service in Lightroom and a supporting framework on your web site. So there are two things to install: TTG CE2 Publisher in Lightroom, and the Publisher back-end on your server. Those two things are very easy to do. You’ll also need to set permissions on certain folders on your website, namely the galleries/ folder (or whatever folder you’ve set to contain your galleries) and the log/ folder inside of the publisher folder. You do this using your FTP client (Filezilla and the like). Full instructions are provided on the Documents page of the TTG site.

The TTG documents state to set folder permission to 777, which gives pretty much universal write permission. On my site, folders are by default set to 755 for permissions. Since I’ve been playing with Publisher for awhile, I’ve created some test folders. I’ve sometimes forgotten to set the permissions to 777. But what I’ve found is that the Publisher works anyway on my host at 755. Your mileage may differ. There have been reports of some hosts not allowing permissions to be set at 777, but will allow 755, which still works.

Where you can get messed up is in the verification process. Be sure to fill out the path to the publisher/api folder exactly. This gets easy to muck up if you’re placing the publisher folder in a sub folder or sub-domain rather than the root of your site. So if verification initially fails, look to the path. I speak from experience.

For gallery thumbnails in the indexes (called cover images), you can choose between using a specific picture from your thumbnails folder, having it chosen randomly, or select custom. If you select custom you’ll need to supply custom thumbnails and upload them to the album’s (gallery’s) custom_thumbnails folder.

There is one catch to using the Album Sets: In Lightroom, Album Sets cannot contain pictures, they contain Albums and other Album Sets. Since they can’t contain pictures, thumbnails are not created for Album Sets. This means that your Album Sets won’t have any thumbnails to represent them in an index. You’ll have to supply them yourself. And it’s easy to do. Just export thumbnails from Lightroom’s Library module at the size you need and upload them to the thumbnails/ folder of your Album Set. If you create an Export Preset you can do this right from the Albums in the Album Set you’re working with. Just highlight all Albums in the set to reveal all the images. Then highlight those images you want the Album Set to use as representation in the parent level index (Album Set). Right click on one of the highlighted thumbnails, choose Export. Either choose Export again to be taken to the Export dialog or choose one of your Export presets.

To the left is an example of the contents of one of the indexes (Album Sets) on my TTG Publisher test site (click image for a better look). The two thumbnails on the left are links to galleries (Albums). The two on the right are links to other indexes (Album Sets) that contain more galleries.

The thumbnails on the left representing the galleries are automatically taken from the galleries’ respective thumbnails folder. I had to create and upload the thumbnails shown representing the indexes. I created several for each index and they are shown randomly, as is the thumbnail for the Palouse gallery. If you click refresh on the actual page, all the thumbnails will change except for the one representing the “custom thumb test” gallery.

Go see for yourself while the test site is still up.

One user of Publisher has done a creative thing with his site. Instead of having the usual Galleries link in the navigation menu bar (like I do), he has Portfolio and Prints. Since the Publisher needs to be at the same folder level on the server as the folder that will hold the galleries, he placed the Publisher server-side folder (the folder that contains that which makes all this work) alongside his galleries/ folder in the root of his site. He then created two Album Sets: Prints and Portfolio and placed other indexes (Album Sets) and/or galleries (Albums) within these sets.

In his navigation menu he eliminated the link to the Galleries.php page and instead created links to the album set pages (/galleries/portfolio/ and galleries/prints/). It creates a clean look and is very functional. Take a look: http://www.bartoncreative.com/

So if you’ve been using the TTG plug-ins for your web galleries, the Publisher can make your life a lot easier by making gallery updates and management easier. And if you’ve been thinking of jumping in and creating a web site with the TTG Lightroom plug-ins, the release of the Publisher should be a pretty good motive to jump. In, that is.

Read the Publisher release announcement here.