Dreamweaver

Create a web photo album

You can automatically generate a website that displays a photo album of images located in a given folder. Dreamweaver uses Fireworks to create a thumbnail image and a larger image for each image in the folder. Dreamweaver then creates a web page containing all the thumbnails, as well as links to the larger images. To create a web photo album, you must have both Dreamweaver and Fireworks 4 or later installed on your system.

Before you begin, place all of the images for your photo album in a single folder. (The folder doesn’t need to be in a site.) In addition, make sure that the image filenames have any of the following extensions: .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .psd, .tif, or .tiff. Images with unrecognized file extensions won’t appear in the photo album.

  1. In Dreamweaver, select Commands > Create Web Photo Album.
  2. In the Photo Album Title text box, enter a title. The title will appear in a gray rectangle at the top of the page of thumbnails.

    Fill in the Subheading Info and Other Info text boxes to enter up to two lines of additional text below the title.

  3. Select the folder containing source images by clicking the Browse button next to the Source Images Folder text box. Then select (or create) a destination folder in which to place all the exported images and HTML files by clicking the Browse button next to the Destination Folder text box.

    The destination folder should not already contain a photo album—if it does, and if any new images have the same names as previously used images, you may overwrite existing thumbnail and image files.

  4. Specify display options for the thumbnail images:

    • Select a size for the thumbnail images from the Thumbnail Size menu. Images are scaled proportionally so that the thumbnails fit within a square of the specified pixel dimensions.

    • To display the filename of each original image below its thumbnail, select Show Filenames.

    • Enter the number of columns for the table that displays the thumbnails.

  5. From the Thumbnail Format menu, select one of the GIF (128 or 256 colors) or JPEG (better picture quality or smaller file size) formats.
  6. From the Photo Format menu, select a GIF or JPEG format for the large images. It doesn’t have to be the same as the format you specified for the thumbnails.
    Note: You can’t use your original image files as the large images, because original image formats other than GIF and JPEG might not be displayed properly on all browsers. If your original images are JPEG files, the large images may have larger file sizes or be of lower quality than the original images.
  7. Select a Scale percentage for the large-size images.

    Setting Scale to 100% creates large-size images the same size as the originals. The scale percentage is applied to all the images; if your original images aren’t all the same size, scaling them by the same percentage may not produce the desired results.

  8. Select Create Navigation Page For Each Photo to create an individual web page for each source image, containing navigation links labeled Back, Home, and Next.

    If you select this option, the thumbnails link to the navigation pages. If you don’t select this option, the thumbnails link directly to the large images.

  9. Click OK to create the HTML and image files for the web photo album.

    Fireworks starts (if it’s not already running) and creates the thumbnails and large images. This may take several minutes if you have many image files. When the processing is complete, Dreamweaver becomes active again and creates the page containing the thumbnails.

  10. When you see the “Album Created” message, click OK.

    You may have to wait a few seconds for your photo album page to appear. The thumbnails appear alphabetically by filename.

    Note: If you click Cancel while Dreamweaver is creating the album, you don’t stop the process. Clicking Cancel merely prevents Dreamweaver from displaying the main photo album page.