Can someone point me to the user manual for CE3?
I don’t believe that the CE3 documentation exists any more. Do you have any specific questions?
I feel the need of chiming in here. I’ve been a long time user of CE1-3, paused because I was unsure how to proceed. I set things aside. Once I decided to proceed I am a happy Backlight 4 user, who no longer uses the Lightroom publisher, preferring the convivence of Backlight publishing. Trust this group.
Thanks Rod and r42itus. I have the simplest of non professional, non commercial sites. It’s just an index page that links to a series of galleries that I create with the Lightroom publisher. Taking it down and learning a new app makes me nervous. Really all I want to do is increase the size of the images in my galleries from 960x720 (the gallery template was created when that seemed a reasonable size) to something like 50% bigger. I guess I need to create a new gallery template and upload that, but I’m not sure how to do it.
Ed
If you saved Web Templates of your gallery design, go to Lightroom’s Web Module > Saved Templates and click on it.
To change image size, go to the Output Setting section under Image Renditions.
After making changes, export the gallery. This is the Publisher template you will upload. You can either overwrite your old template or give it a new name. Overwriting will be the best option because all you need to then do is upload it, replacing the old template.
If you didn’t save any Web templates, then perhaps you have the galleries you originally made to create the Publisher templates. Click on one of those and make the image size changes. Export and upload.
The upload location is…going from memory…in the publisher/templates/galleries/ folder? Or something like that. You’ll find it when you go to ftp the newly exported gallery.
But I’d echo Ross (@r42itus) and recommend updating to BL4. For several reasons:
- It’s much easier than dealing with the LIghtroom Web Module. Design is much faster. No more export and upload. No more relying on Lightroom for the existence of your website.
- Who knows how long Adobe will support the Web Module. One day you may not be able to use the CE3 plugins at all.
- Who knows how long CE3 albums will be compatible with modern browsers.
I’ll try to get into Backlight 4. Right now, the Lightroom Publisher when used from the Lightroom Library seems incredibly easy. But I need to upload a new Gallery Template and I don’t know how to do that. Those are the choices that appear in the Publisher pulldown menu you when you create a new album with the Publisher plug-in.
That Gallery-0 looks like it’s your gallery template (though my recollection is that there should be a folder for gallery templates and a folder for auto-index templates.
At any rate, you would need to export and upload a gallery (it doesn’t need to contain images) to the proper templates folder. you do this via FTP, not the publisher plugin.
Okay, I thiunk I get that. BTW, I just bought Backlight 4. Can I install it over CE3 without disrupting CE3?? That is, keep the old site going while I configure the new application?
Depends. Is your site completely created by CE3?
Installing Backlight will overwrite the index.php file in the root of the site and create a new home page.
Did you want to convert your existing Publisher created CE3 albums to Backlight control or are you planning to start from scratch?
If you want to convert, you’ll first need to migrate the CE3 albums to CE4 Publisher. Then you’ll be able to migrate the CE4 Publisher controlled albums to Backlight.
Matt can get you the CE4 files. Or, if it’s ok with him, I can send them to you too. I also copied some of the old documentation about migrating from CE3 to CE4 that I can send you if you want to go that route.
If you don’t have a ton of galleries and you do have them in collections in Lightroom, it’s sometimes easier to simply start from scratch and republish everything. Especially considering you want to increase image sizes.