Jason & Susan

Updated (2/9/08):We installed the Tabs and Slides Wordpress plugin so that you can view all three photo templates on one page.

We’ve experimented with different photo gallery templates to display our pictures. The guy behind Airtight Interactive created really awesome templates for displaying pictures using flash. These templates can be used with various photo applications like Picasa and is very easy to use! Best of all, they are free!

There are three types of templates:

1. SimpleViewer—Most of the slideshows in our photogallery use the SimpleViewer template. This template has a thumbnail slider at the top (or left/right/bottom depending on preference) and a central picture viewing area. You can view the pictures one-by-one sequentially or by scrolling through the thumbnails and clicking the pictures you want to look at. However, the captions don’t look too pretty and there’s no auto-play slideshow feature.
2. AutoViewer—We’ve used this template a few times in the past and really like the way the pictures and captions are displayed. There’s an auto-play slideshow feature and at the same time, can be sped up or reversed when you click the left or right arrow. The downside is that there are no thumbnails for scrolling and that’s the only reason why we don’t use this template more often. Maybe people only want to look at a few pictures via the thumbnail slider instead of going through the entire slideshow.
3. PostcardViewer—This is the newest template and we’ve never used this before until now. It’s really neat for getting a quick glimpse at all the photos in a big pile of thumbnail-sized collage. You can click on any picture to zoom in/out. It’s really slick but unfortunately, that’s a lot of clicking if you want to look at all the pictures. Also, all the zooming in and out might make your head dizzy.

In any case, all three templates produce really cool flash slideshows and can be used for various purposes. We’ll be using all three different templates in our future photo slideshows!