After opening my Spirit of Place photography gallery, I wanted to update my Web site to emphasize my photographs and workshops rather than my books. I also wanted a way to easily generate gallery pages on the site when I create new or improved images. There are many tools these days to help one create photography Web sites, but I wanted to stick with my philosophy of seeing what can be done with Photoshop before turning to other software. Creating the site this way allows me to do it myself, put it anywhere, and have complete control over the images and how they look.

Sorting thousands of images

A key part of creating an online gallery for your work is choosing which images to use. I don’t have the space to go into detail, but I sorted images into folders in Adobe Bridge (which comes with Photoshop), tagged them with stars, and created folders that contained the best images of topics for which I wanted to create galleries. (I also kept copies of these images in their original folders that were sorted by date.)

With these folders, it’s easy to generate a new gallery from any particular folder, and then quickly update that part of my Web site. As you read on, you’ll see how to do that. To learn more about how to sort and rate your images using Bridge, see the article I wrote in the July/August 2007 PHOTO Techniques. (You can also check for any previous articles on www.barryhaynes.com.) Some people prefer to use keywords to organize their images. One reason I’ve chosen to use the folder-name model is that I can easily make backups of all my most important files by dragging a copy of that entire folder hierarchy to another hard disk. Any time I make significant changes, I make a backup to one of several external drives that are not usually online.