One of the common questions we receive about SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom is how does it work with our content management system SlideShowPro Director.
First, let's cover the basics of both apps.
SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom is a web gallery plugin for Adobe Lightroom -- a desktop application for both Windows and Mac OS X designed for managing photos. The plugin uses content from your Lightroom Library, and exports a Flash-based slideshow containing web optimized duplicates of your originals for you to upload to your web site and display in any web browser. Your slideshow can be any size or color you want, and there are plenty of customization options for you to choose from.
SlideShowPro Director doesn't publish slideshows, but rather manages and publishes slideshow content. You can upload images and/or videos, group them together in albums, and group albums together as galleries. Then when you're ready to load some content, you link either :stapi: or SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom to an album or gallery inside Director and everything loads automatically. All of your content is stored on a web server, and retrieved upon request.
So in the context of SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom, think of Director as an "alternate library" for slideshow content. Instead of using images you've imported to Adobe Lightroom on your desktop, you're using images uploaded to Director on a web server.
Which leads to an important question: what difference is there then between using content in your Lightroom Library as opposed to using Director content?
When it comes time to update an existing slideshow you've already built with SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom, you have to republish all of your images and browser content. Lightroom has no way of knowing what's new and what's old, so it simply re-exports everything. This isn't a big deal if you update infrequently, but could be laborious for those who do.
Director on the other hand makes updating easy, for you don't have to republish anything. Once a slideshow is linked to an album inside Director, you simply upload new content to that album through your web browser. Director also offers sophisticated auto-sorting tools to always place new slideshow content in the order you need. For those who need to upload content to SlideShowPro Director from Lightroom, we offer a free Lightroom to SlideShowPro Director Plugin? so you can quickly/easily update your SlideShowPro Director content from without leaving Lightroom.
When using SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom, the dimensions of your slideshow and the images you export are under your control. This is great for people who want complete control over their presentation, but a bit time consuming for those who publish often for it requires manually changing the exported width/height of your content anytime you change the dimensions of your slideshow.
SlideShowPro Director handles all your image sizing automatically. It uses an on-demand publishing system that uses the original images you've uploaded to create web-optimized versions that are tailored to fit any slideshow that requests content. So if you were to change the dimensions of a slideshow in any way, Director would recognize that change and create new images at the exact dimensions required.
Because SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom uses your Lightroom Library on your desktop, you must always use the machine Lightroom is installed on to export updated content.
Director on the other hand gives you the freedom to update content anywhere, anytime, and from more than one user. That's because Director is completely browser-based, and accessible from any computer. So no matter where you are, or how many people you have uploading content, it's always available.
To summarize, SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom -- when used by itself -- publishes slideshows using the content from your Lightroom Library. Content updates and changes are a manual process handled locally on your computer, and uploaded to your web site. When using SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom with Director however, your slideshow content instead comes from an online source, and you don't have to re-export anything from Lightroom.
You may also want to read about the interaction between Lightroom and Director by following this link.