Creating E-Mail And Web Output
| You can easily e-mail any selection of images by choosing File > Email. Aperture will create a scaled copy of each image and attach it to a message in your e-mail program of choice. In the Preferences dialog box, you can specify your e-mail program as well as the preset used for the resizing (Figure 8.5). By default, Aperture uses the Email Medium JPEG preset, which scales your image to fit inside a 1,024 x 1,024 box and uses a JPEG quality setting of 8. If you prefer a different size or file format, you can either select a different preset or build one of your own. Figure 8.5. In the Preferences dialog box, you can specify the e-mail program and export preset that you want to use for exporting images to an e-mail program.
Creating a Web GalleryAperture can create HTML galleries of your images. If you have a .Mac account, Aperture will automatically upload the resulting gallery to your iDisk for serving. If you don't have a .Mac account, Aperture can output a folder full of HTML and JPEG files, which you can upload to your own server. A Web gallery in Aperture consists of an index page, which provides thumbnails of all of your included images, and navigation. If you click a thumbnail, you'll be taken to a detail page that displays a larger image. Detail pages let you navigate through the gallery and also return to the index page (Figure 8.6). Figure 8.6. An Aperture-generated Web gallery consists of index pages (left), which contain image thumbnails, and detail pages (right), which contain larger versions. Here's how to create a Web gallery:
A Web gallery is just like an album in that it includes references to your original images. However, when you click a Web gallery in the Projects pane, the Viewer pane displays a special Web gallery editing interface (Figure 8.7). Figure 8.7. When you click a Web gallery in the Projects pane, the Viewer pane displays Aperture's Web gallery editor. Aperture will generate as many index pages as are required to hold all of the images that you add to the gallery. You can change the number of images that each index page holds by using the Columns and Rows selectors at the top of the Viewer pane. You can view individual detail pages by using the Detail navigator below the index pages. Customizing a Web GalleryAperture contains several Web gallery themes that you can view by clicking the Theme button at the top of the window. In the Choose Web Themes pane (Figure 8.8), select the theme that you want to use. You can switch themes at any time. Figure 8.8. You can select from several predesigned themes for your Web gallery by clicking the Themes button. Each theme has an editable site title, which you can change by double-clicking it and then entering new text (Figure 8.9). Some themes also have an editable subtitle or an additional block of text. Figure 8.9. You can edit many of the text fields on a Web gallery Web page by double-clicking the field to make it editable. Most themes also have one customizable piece of metadata. You can specify what you want that metadata to be by choosing a metadata set from the Metadata Set pop-up menu at the top of the window. Detail pages also have a selectable piece of metadata. Click a detail page to view it and then use the Metadata Set pop-up menu to choose the metadata set you want displayed. The Fit Images Within pop-up menu lets you specify whether your thumbnails should be constrained to fit within a square or rectangle or displayed at the width specified in the Thumbnail Cell Size fields. You control the order of the images in your Web gallery using the Browser pane. The order that appears in the Browser is the order that will be used when the images are placed in the gallery. To add more images to the gallery, drag them from your project into the Web gallery. To delete an image, select it and press the Delete key. Your original images will not be deleted, of course, because the Web gallery holds only references. Creating a Smart Web GalleryA Smart Web Gallery works just like a Smart Album (see Chapter 4). Using the Smart Settings HUD attached to the Smart Web Gallery, you can define criteria for the images that you want included in that gallery. All images in the project that have matching criteria will be added to the gallery. All other design and customization features are the same as for normal Web galleries. Tip When you create any new object in an Aperture projectWeb galleries, Web journals, albums, books Aperture automatically selects the name of the object so that you can immediately give it a more meaningful name. You can re-edit the name at any time by double-clicking it in the Projects pane. Creating a Web JournalA Web journal is a variation of the Web gallery that allows you to add text. Instead of index pages, a Web journal has journal pages, which can contain any number of image thumb-nails and multiple text blocks. When you click a thumbnail, Aperture takes you to the detail page for that image. Web journal detail pages work just like Web gallery detail pages (Figure 8.10). You can create as many journal pages as you want, and each can tell its own story and have its own collection of images. Figure 8.10. Web journals consist of journal pages (left), which can contain any amount of images and text. When you click an image on a journal page, you'll be taken to a larger, detail page for that image (right). You create a Web journal by selecting images and then choosing File > New > Web journal. Customizing a Web JournalWeb journals provide all of the same customization features as Web galleries. You can pick a theme for your Web journal using the Theme button, change the selectable metadata using the Metadata Set pop-up menu, and choose the number of columns that you want to display. Web journal detail pages have no customization options. Building a Journal PageWhen you create a Web journal, your fist page initially contains no images. You add an image by dragging it from the Browser pane to the journal page. Aperture will display a green bar to indicate where the image will go (Figure 8.11). Figure 8.11. Drag your first image onto a journal page. Aperture displays a green bar to indicate where the image will be placed. Some themes provide pages with empty boxes that you can drag images into (Figure 8.12). If a page includes a shaded box with a + in the middle, you can drag an image into this frame. The image serves as a header graphic that you can include on each of your journal pages. At any time, you can double-click the image to invoke the Image Scale HUD, which you can then use to zoom and crop the image. Figure 8.12. If the journal page for your selected theme includes an image box, you can drag an image into the box and then scale it to your liking. You can continue to add images next to your initial image, but a single row cannot contain more images than you have defined using the Column pop-up menu at the top of the window. Clicking the Add Text button at the top of the window adds an editable block of text to the page. You can add as many text blocks as you want, and you can insert images between text blocks to build up your page. Adding Journal PagesYou can add pages by clicking on the + button at the bottom of the Journal panel. Some themes provide a choice of page styles, which you can access from the Page Template menu at the bottom of the Journal panel (Figure 8.13). Figure 8.13. Using the Page Template menu, you can choose the style you want for the current page.
Aperture can also automatically build journal pages for you, based on the metadata in your image. Using the action menu at the bottom of the Journal panel, you can tell Aperture to build a separate page for each day (it will determine days by looking at the date metadata in your images), ranking, keyword, and more. Customizing Aperture's TemplatesAlthough Aperture doesn't provide a built-in facility for customizing templates, if you have some experience with HTML and CSS, then you can do a little hacking on Aperture's existing templates to alter them or create entirely new templates. Aperture's templates are stored in the Aperture application package. The templates themselves are just HTML, CSS, and JPEG files, and you can easily edit them using any text or HTML editor. With a little editing, you can easily change the existing color scheme or even create new layouts (Figure 8.14). Figure 8.14. With a little hacking of Aperture's Web theme files, you can customize your Web galleries. For more information on customizing Aperture's Web templates, see www.completedigitalphotography.com/?p=427. |
