As image processing and management software I am using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (meanwhile in version 2.4, still looking for an adequate Open Source alternative).

One thing I like about Lightroom is the easy, fast and integrated way to create web galleries out of your photo collections. What I was missing so far was a way to link back from a certain flash web gallery to my gallery overview and to the main page of my blog.

I found a really useful description for that purpose over at Bluefire Blog, that also has dozens of tips and tricks about how to customize the Lightroom Flash Galleries.

To add a link back to my gallery overview, I could just use the GUI of Lightroom and enter the needed data in the Web-tab as shown in this screenshot.

To use the gallery title to link back to the main page of my blog, I had to manually edit the file group.xml that was located in the subdirectory /resources/mediaGroupData/ of the gallery’s root. There I had to change the tag

<siteTitle>apfelkraut.org</siteTitle>

to

<siteTitle>
<a href="http://www.apfelkraut.org">apfelkraut.org</a>
</siteTitle>

That’s it! Be sure that you test the links in their domain, normally meaning directly on your website. If the modified gallery is used in a domain that is different to the domain you linked to, the links will be underlined and clickable but nothing more will happen. The actual links will not work. This is due to a security feature in recent Adobe Flash implementations. For details about this behaviour and how to change it see this TechNote from Adobe.

Needless to say to a professional web programmer … do not forget to clear your browser’s cache in case you changed something. I’ve heard of people searching for hours for a failure that was only caused by the browser loading an outdated file from its cache … 😉

My gallery is available here. Enjoy!