HTML Export feature requests

[derek]

Hi all,

First and foremost, I'm an avid Photo Mechanic fan, so thank you for all the great features you've built in!

I have spent quite a bit of time working with the HTML Export feature to create websites, and have a few feature requests that would make it an even more wonderful feature:

• User should be able to create "search-engine-friendly" preview URLs. Currently it is only possible that preview URLs where the last segment is "preview#.html" where it would be great to be able to use a lowercase "-"-separated {title} for example. This would make the content of the page easier to recognize based on the URL.
• User should be able to generate thumbnail images that have the original "filenamebase" without the original filename extension. For example, I created a gallery with the "Use original filenames for images" option enabled, and where my original filename was "picture.nef", my preview image file was turned in to picture.nef.jpg, where I would expect  to be able to make it picture.jpg.
• A big nice-to-have: User should be able to create multiple preview images at different resolutions to support using the srcset attribute on img tags. This is a big bandwidth-saver for sites being viewed on small screens, and also allows larger images to be used for larger screens. Ideally the user could define a set of preview image widths, for example 200px, 400px,  800px.

Thanks for your consideration, and again for making such great software.

Kind regards,
Derek

[derek]

One more note about request #1 - probably more important than the URL being "search-engine-friendly", this feature would allow each image to have a permanent preview URL, where currently if the gallery is updated with new images, the URL for a given image is subject to change. For example, if I post a gallery and image "a" lives at www.mysite.com/my-gallery/preview2.html, then I update the gallery with a new image "b" at the beginning of the gallery, the URL for image "a" would change to www.mysite.com/my-gallery/preview3.html. This limits the ability to effectively share the URL with others.

Just remembered this and thought I'd update the thread.

Thanks again!
Derek

[Kirk Baker]

Derek,

One more note about request #1 - probably more important than the URL being "search-engine-friendly", this feature would allow each image to have a permanent preview URL, where currently if the gallery is updated with new images, the URL for a given image is subject to change. For example, if I post a gallery and image "a" lives at www.mysite.com/my-gallery/preview2.html, then I update the gallery with a new image "b" at the beginning of the gallery, the URL for image "a" would change to www.mysite.com/my-gallery/preview3.html. This limits the ability to effectively share the URL with others.

And how do you expect Photo Mechanic to be able to keep the names consistent?  It never looks at an existing gallery (completely ignores it in fact) and completely regenerates the entire export each time.

Without fundamentally changing how the feature works, I don't see how it can be accomplished.  Your request lies outside the scope of the feature as designed.

As for request #2, the 'picture.nef.jpg' naming is done in order to deal with people who shoot RAW+JPEG, keep the images separate, and select all and then export.  This naming scheme still allows you to know what the original name was, and eliminates collisions.  We're not likely to change this behavior.

I agree that the multiple resolutions feature is useful, but I have no idea when we would implement such a feature.

-Kirk

[derek]

Hi Kirk,

Thank you for your reply. I wouldn’t expect Photo Mechanic to keep track of which image is which, rather I’m hoping that the user would be able to somehow create a site with “permalinks” I’ll call them, meaning a unique preview page URL for each image. If PM Variables could be used as the basis for the HTML filenames, then this would be possible. For example if I had a picture where the title (object) was “My Photo”, the URL could be

www.example.com/my-gallery/my-photo.html
Instead of
www.example.com/my-gallery/preview2.html

In this case www.example.com/my-gallery/my-photo.html could always be a unique URL that is tied to the image without PM having to keep track. The URL would always be unique as long as the user never set "My Photo" as the object (title) for  another image.

Alternately the seqn variable could be used (for example 1234):
www.example.com/my-gallery/1234.html
or in combination with the above:
www.example.com/my-gallery/my-photo/1234.html

Thanks for explaining that this request is out-of-scope for what the feature was designed for, but I posted it as a feature request for your consideration to expand the scope of what the feature was designed for. Just because PM could so easily be used to create customizable photo websites instead of just client preview galleries...

As for #2, thanks for explaining your design rationale - I get it now.

Thanks for your consideration and kind regards,
Derek