Wow, what a long title huh!? Anyway, I really, really, really like the WP-Simpleviewer plugin and have used Simpleviewer as a stand-alone application, so it was only natural that I would want to use it as part of this, my wordpress weblog for my photography website. The only problem I ran into, and I’d consider this to be a major one, was the image quality was very poor and I found that any of my images that had text in them in particular would render very poorly…and when you’re trying to promote yourself as a photographer, potential clients don’t want to see crap.

So, anyone else that stumbles across this and is looking for the solution, well it may not be what you want to hear, but this will give you the best quality image. For the most part, this solution is found here at the developers site click here for the RSS feed I subscribed to for more info.

In a nutshell, a mod that had an effect on quality, but for me, not enough was to change the change the code in wp-simpleviewer-admin.php in line 1183 from imagecopyresized to imagecopyresampled. In the end, my best quality results are accomplished by following these directions.

Really, the only thing I’m offering here is a workflow that helps me, especially since I had 7 galleries to convert back to a more decent offering of images. Basically, when you run the WP-simpleviewer plugin it creates a thumbnail folder (tn) and a picture folder (reg), which incidentally is where the generated images go.

1. So in my case I use my origional files on my laptop for the gallery I want to improve and place just those images in a temporary folder and use the Automate feature in Photoshop to create a web photo gallery, setting my image quality to 8 and image size to 450 pixels.
2. Once the gallery is created I go to the images folder of my newly created webgallery using an FTP program and transfer the photoshop created images into the ‘reg’ folder of the gallery that I’m trying to improve the quality of. I agree to replacing the old images with the new, go back to my weblog page, hold the ’shift’ key with the refresh selection (Internet Explorer) to clear out the cache and test my gallery…. if everything was done correctly, you should notice a distinct difference between your old images from your new.
3. After I’ve verified everything is working for that particular gallery, I go to the temporary directory I created to store the images from the gallery I wanted to create a gallery photo page from via photoshop and simply delete all those images. I then go to the other temporary web directory I used for photoshops destination folder and delete all the content out of there.
4. Now I’m ready to complete the whole process all over again. The nice thing about this process is that the Automate feature will now use my newly created default directories and I don’t have to go searching for the directory I want to recreate.

As an example of my folder naming structure this is what I use:

My gallery source folder on my laptop: galleryTemp

My gallery destination folder on my laptop: webTemp

Good luck to ya if you’re into using this gallery. Esthetically this is one of the best looking galleries, especially when your into clean and simple, and lightweight is great as well.

Rob