Introduction

WebExport is a universal exporter for iPhoto 5 and 6. It is geared for the production of low to high end photo galleries on any kind of website. I developed it to produce the galleries on my website, and in all likelihood, it will work on your site.

WebExport is based on the basecode of CustomHTMLExport, a similar product with a totally unpronounceable name. There are significant changes, and so much of the code has changed that I think it really is a new product. The capabilities of the new template engine are endless, and I think it is a much better product. It has totally new features like being able to save metadata back to iPhoto, a totally revamped site attribute manager, and a very cool debug pane.

Have fun with the app and good luck making templates. You are always welcome to email me, or to post on my website.

User Interface

The user interface is divided into 4 segments, Website Attributes, Metadata, Template Attributes, and Debug. Each control different portions of the export process.

Website Attributes

Site Attributes

The Website Attributes pane deals with site-wide attributes, like gallery title, comments, or the author of the page. It can also deal with specific details like the number of photos per page, image size, etc. This space is for anything that the template developer wants. It is controlled by the attributes.kvf file inside the template. Check out making templates for more information about this. Tags do different things in different templates. For example, in templates that do not support comments, the comment field will not be editable, but it will be editable in templates that do support it. Attributes only appear if they are used by the current template, so if you don't see one you want, take a look at the template and consider changing it manually, or email the developer.

Metadata

Metadata

The metadata tab allows you to look at all of the metadata that is associated with the photos you are going to export. Some of these are built-in to iPhoto, like comments, title, and the hidden ones (rating, take date, mod date, etc.). Others you can add yourself, like author, latitude, longitude, etc. These are added with a special syntax into the comment field in iPhoto. These look like this: "[author: Daniel Staudigel]". Putting this into the comment field would add my name as an author to the image. You can use any field you want, and it will show up and be editable in the metadata table. You can even change these values and save them back to iPhoto! Author is not really necessary, particularly if you take all of the images in your library, and just add it as an author of the page, but it comes in handy if you have tons of people all taking pictures and who want some credit on your website. Author is always enabled, and templates should be designed to be flexible in what metadata they have and use.

Template Attributes

Template Attributes

The template attributes tab is very simple. It has no functionality but to let you know what the deal with the current template is. It allows you to see a very simple preview, see the name, description, and copyright of the template. The most important feature is that you can read the template's read-me directly from within the application. This allows you to see what the developer intended all of the site attributes to do.

Debug

Debug Pane

The debug pane is an important new feature of WebExport (over CustomHTMLExport). It allows developers (and users) to see what is going on with the templates. It enables an extensive debug log which you normally cannot (and wouldn't want to) see. You can execute individual steps of the export process independently, and repeatedly. This way you can have much quicker debug cycles for your template, because you can see all of the output of the export process. You also can repeat it every time you make a very small change to the template, and you can see the differences.

As a user, its functionality is somewhat limited, except that you can help out the template developer by giving them the output from this panel.

Next Steps

Hopefully, you'll be so excited to use WebExport, that you'll want to create your own templates! If you want to go in that direction, please check out the developer's guide.

I am also always available for contact at my website or my email address.