I dunno how you'd do it using CS5 software, but using a server-side scripting language like PHP it'd be a matter of a couple of lines of code to enumerate through one folder (of thumbnails) and display each one as a link that points to the bigger image ... given that they have some similarity in name (e.g. the thumbnail of 1.jpg is named 1_tn.jpg or named the same but in a 'thumb' subfolder...).

>> ^campionidelmondo:

I dunno how you'd do it using CS5 software, but using a server-side scripting language like PHP it'd be a matter of a couple of lines of code to enumerate through one folder (of thumbnails) and display each one as a link that points to the bigger image ... given that they have some similarity in name (e.g. the thumbnail of 1.jpg is named 1_tn.jpg or named the same but in a 'thumb' subfolder...).


Beat me to the punch, campioni.

1. From the Bridge side you'll want to run a batch Image Processing to generate your thumbnails (might want to run one action for resizing landscape photos versus run another action for resizing portrait photos). I believe Batch options are in the Tools > Photoshop > Batch menu.

2. From the website end you'll absolutely want to use a more dynamic language (PHP, ASP) to traverse your images/thumbs directories and dynamically generate your gallery. Do not do this manually with static HTML!

3. Fancy up your presentation with pagination (via PHP/ASP) and a lightbox-esque modal window popup for the images when clicking on the thumbnails (I'm personally a fan of Shadowbox but these are a dime a dozen).

Good luck!

Being at a college, our entire website is filtered through a content management system (Ironpoint).
Because of this all pages are restricted to use the tools built withing that system.

I get around this by posting galleries on a secondary server and embedding that site within the Ironpoint page and template. http://www.okanagan.bc.ca/administration/publicaffairs/Ceremonies/Grad_Photos.html

You'll notice older galleries (2009-2010) are built using Dreamweaver and work just fine linking to the original image (although we were using smaller versions at the time). The last set (Winter 2011) was built using Bridge. Another problem with bridge is that it changes the file names which completely messes with our image filing system.

I'm afraid PHP and ASP are out of my parameters. The pages must be stand alone files I can just FTP to the secondary server.
If I can't use the adobe software (which is a huge oversight from Adobe, then I'll need to find different software - maybe hunt down an old version of ACDSee. (I run a Mac at work and my old software is Win so still not a clean fix)

If dynamic content is out of the question maybe one of these tools will help (not all of them are free):

Web Photo Galleries - Mac Software

Web Photo Galleries - Windows Freeware

Write a python script to produce the html pages, based on the contents of a directory full of images.

Re-run the python script when you add a new batch of images.

No server-hosted code.

If you want fancy rendering, try jQuery, it runs in the client.

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/css/fresh-jquery-image-gallery-display-solutions/

It's a bit ugly, but if you run it from a secondary server you can do this:

Use php to generate a html file.

Copy the source of that, and save it to an actual html file and put that on the secondary server.

embed the file you generated once in the main site.

Profit.

Something like this is what I've used before.

if ($handle = opendir('./images/'))
{
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle)))
{
if ($file !== "ls.php")
{
if (strlen($file) > 2)
{
echo '<img src="./images/thumbnails/'.$file.'" alt="" width="100px" />';
}
}
}
closedir($handle);
}

Thanks everyone.

I'm going back to using ACDSee. I just installed it on my windows laptop and built all the galleries I needed in under 5 minutes. Having created all the thumbnails and HTML pages I needed I only have to go in and tweak the headers on each thumbnail pages using the text option in Dreamweaver.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Sorry Adobe