Publishing a Lightroom web gallery
Exporting a web gallery
Usually the idea of a web gallery is to post the files to a website so anyone with an Internet connection can view the images. However, at times you'll want to save the files to your local computer instead. This may be for the purpose of sharing the gallery on a computer serving as a kiosk in your gallery, or so you can send the files on a CD or other media to share with clients, or for a variety of other purposes.
If you want to save the web gallery files to your computer, you can click the Export button at the bottom of the right panel. This brings up the Save Web Gallery dialog box (Figure 1), where you can specify a location for saving the files. While you're specifying a location where you want to save the files, think of this as a typical Save As dialog box, where you're specifying both a location and filename for the file to be saved. In this case, that filename translates into the folder name that will contain the many files that make up your gallery.
Figure 1: The Save Web Gallery dialog box allows you to specify the folder and filename for the gallery, which will determine where the main folder for the gallery will be created and what it will be called.
For example, if you want to Export the files into the Web Galleries folder under the name Favorites Gallery, you would select the Web Galleries folder in the Save Web Gallery dialog box and then type Favorites Gallery in the File Name field. The result will be a folder called Favorites Gallery in the Web Galleries folder, with all of the files necessary for the website saved within the Favorites Gallery folder. When you click the Save button, Lightroom will process your images and create all the necessary files (Figure 2). You can then navigate to the location where the images were saved and double-click the index document to open your web gallery in your web browser.
Note: Choosing File > Export from the menu produces the exact same result as clicking the Save button at the bottom of the right panel in the Gallery module.
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Figure 2: When you click Save, Lightroom creates a folder in the specified location containing all the files required for your gallery.
