Putting together a sequential photo gallery – one of the web’s great features – can be done in any number of ways by using a variety of software packages, such as Macromedia Flash or iMovie (for the Macs), or by simply building your own template. All of those methods require a good deal of time and a steep learning curve.

But there is a way to avoid that learning curve (and, instructors, chances are that your students know it already): PowerPoint.

Personally, I am not a particular fan of PowerPoint. I have been in too many audiences where speakers used dull or unseeable PowerPoint presentations to punish us unmercifully. (What crime had we committed, I have asked myself during those times, to deserve this?) I also find PowerPoint to be clunky to work with as a layout device, especially when compared to Quark or InDesign.

Still, PowerPoint is a wildly popular program that small children seem to know instinctively shortly after they learn to read. I won’t go into the particulars of building a PowerPoint presentation here. Instead, I want to look at what the software allows you to do easily – concentrate on the gallery and the pictures themselves.

A photo gallery should have the following elements:

• Pictures, of course. The pictures should be prepared and sized before work on building the gallery begins. They should be sized so they will fit onto the gallery slide without having to be re-scaled. Re-scaling increases the danger that pictures will be distorted (that is, scaled non-proportionally), and that is absolutely verboten in journalism.

• Cutlines. The written information that explains a photograph is almost as important as the photo itself. Pictures are rarely self-explanatory, and photographers should never assume that they are. Cutlines should be written before the gallery is built. They can be edited inside the gallery as the design demands.

• Headline. This might simply be a label, but it should tell what the picture is and be a cue to reading the cutline.

• Title. A gallery should have a title that appears on every slide.

• Credit line. At minimum, the credit line should name the photographer, but it might also include the photo editor and/or the person who put the gallery together.

• Date. You should always put some kind of time marker on your galleries so the viewers can have an idea about when they were produced.

• Links. Making a link out of a piece of text in PowerPoint is simple. That function is found under the Insert menu. The result of using text is clunky (see the Great Smoky Mountain gallery that accompanies this article), so I would suggest building an image that can be made into a link. Give some careful consideration to links and where you want your views to go if they are in the middle or at the end of the gallery.

• Logo. Your web site should be clearly identified on every part of the gallery. It is a good idea to make the logo a link to the home page of the site, as it should be on other pages of the site.

Using these elements, a photo gallery can be designed in a variety of ways. But there is one abiding principle to adhere to:

Give as much space as possible to the pictures themselves, and let as little as possible distract from them.

At minimum, I think, this means designing slide where all of the elements remain the same and only the pictures themselves change.

Now, back to PowerPoint.

Once you have all of your slides set up, the rest is amazing simple. Save the presentation as you normally would (and as you should have been doing while you are building it). Then save it again (same menu) as a webpage. The software will ask you where you want to save it, and you should put it in the folder of your web site where you want it to reside.

PowerPoint will convert the first slide of your presentation into an HTML file (it uses the “.htm” suffix rather than the “.html”). It will automatically create the other files necessary for the web and put them into a folder that reflect the name of your file. These two items, the .htm file and the folder, should always stay together. The .htm file is what you will link to when you get your gallery onto the server of your web site.

That’s it. You are ready to build your links from the web pages you want views to use to get to the gallery and move the package onto your site.

The gallery itself will show up as a set of frames, which is what I think is the big downside to all of this. Still, the gallery is there and with a nice set of buttons that will allow the view to click through it.

Once you get these basics down, you will probably figure out some ways to enhance your galleries. For instance, PowerPoint has a couple of ways of adding buttons and creating internal links to other slides in the presentation, In addition, there are other ways besides text that you can use to create external links.

(If anyone comes up with something clever about using PowerPoint to enhance a gallery, let me know, and I will post it here. And it you know of a way to let the gallery appear without the heavy frames, I would especially appreciate knowing that.)

In order to learn a little more about taking PowerPoint from presentation to web, I have put together a couple of galleries. The first, a four-picture presentation of the Smoky Mountains, is a barebones gallery. The second, a small celebration of football through art, has a few additional enhancements.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

An Artistic Celebration of Football

Jim Stovall (Posted Jan. 20, 2006)
(updated Jan. 31, 2006)

---

About JPROF.com | Who is JPROF? | Contact us
All of the words and images on this site are copyrighted and may not be used without the permission.
Copyright © Jim Stovall 2005
FreeFind.com provides search technology for this website.