SlideShowPro Director is a server-side image/video publishing system for SlideShowPro. The application is installed on your own web server (see requirements), or subscribed to with us, and makes the process of creating web-optimized images for your slideshows quick, easy and completely automatic.
Think of SlideShowPro Director as a digital darkroom that's always open and ready to print. You supply it with photos (or videos) and organize them into groups using albums and galleries (which are simply collections of albums). With content in its library, Director then waits for someone to request material. When the phone rings, SlideShowPro Director asks what size images they need, retrieves from its library the original images you uploaded, and publishes copies at the requested dimensions. If the request is for video, Director simply returns the same video you uploaded. Later, if the phone rings again with a separate request for the same images, SlideShowPro Director creates (if necessary) a new batch of images (again from your originals). The result? A never ending supply of web optimized, perfectly sized photos anytime you need them.
So who's calling Director and requesting content? That's where the SlideShowPro player comes in. The player requests and loads content published by SlideShowPro Director and displays the results in a SWF which can be embedded in any HTML document. With SlideShowPro Director operating behind the scenes, you can concentrate on building/styling your slideshow — not creating photos. SlideShowPro Director gives you the freedom to change your layout, design, or create additional slideshows of varying sizes, and SlideShowPro Director will dutifully meet all your content needs.
Director's publishing system is not only fast and dynamic, but punctual, for content edits are immediately reflected in any slideshow that calls to request content.
For example, if you had a slideshow on your home page containing a handful of recent photos, you could login to SlideShowPro Director anytime to add more photos to that album and/or gallery, refresh your web browser displaying the SWF, and the new content would automatically appear. Not only that, but if you setup Director to automatically sort content by a particular rule (file name, date, etc) and/or apply metadata (like IPTC captions), your new content would immediately join the show using all the same settings as your older images. This gives you the freedom to independently update your slideshow content any time without re-publishing Flash movies or creating additional images.
Because SlideShowPro Director is installed on a web server, everything is accessed through your web browser. This allows you to delete, edit, or add to your Director library any time and from any place. You can also share your installation with other photographers by setting up additional user accounts with varying levels of administrative / editorial control.
To fill Director with content, you simply create an album and upload to it the photos/videos you want to use in your slideshows. If your photos are in Adobe Lightroom, we offer a free Export plugin to upload content directly from your Lightroom library into SlideShowPro Director. You may then load just that album in SlideShowPro, or combine more than one album in a gallery and load that instead. See Retrieving content for a slideshow to learn how.
Those are the basics of how SlideShowPro Director works. Next we'll cover how your content is organized with Albums.
