This weekend I took a breather from book writing to do some updating of my online portfolio. I have created the entire thing in Lightroom thanks to The Turning Gate and their very smart web engines. Web engines masquerade as Web Layout Styles in the Web Module but the ones from TTG are more like web creators. Anyway, I finished customizing my layout and then saved it as a template in the User Templates section of the Template Browser.
This is a very important step because if you don’t save all the custom changes you have made to the selected Layout Style and you leave the Web Module, you will lose any modifications you have made. This can be a little disheartening after working on all the options for so long and having them reset to their defaults with the click of the mouse. I quickly got in the habit of saving my changes every few minutes by right-clicking on my user template and updating with the current changes.
I’ll go into more detail on how I created my portfolio and The Turning Gate web galleries later this week. What I really wanted to share with you today was how I managed to jump from one computer to the other and keep all of my template customizations in place. See, I started off working on my desktop computer in my office, which is a PC. I have a lot of images here so it’s where I initially loaded the web styles into Lightroom from TTG. Well later on I wanted to do some work on my MacBook Pro with images I have on it but I didn’t want to move all the images from computer to computer.
Here’s what I did. First, I exported the customized templates by right-clicking on the user template name and selecting Export.
This creates a lrtemplate file. After I saved all the customized templates I moved them to my Dropbox folder. If you don’t know what Dropbox is, check out their website and start making your life a little easier. I also did this for the TTG files so that I could install them on my Mac. Luckily there is no difference between the Mac and Windows versions of the lrwebengine files so all I had to do was copy them and put them in the right location on my mac.
After installing them, I moved the template files out of my Dropbox and onto my Mac desktop. Then I opened Lightroom, Ctrl-clicked on User Templates in the Web Module and then on Import in the pop-up menu and then selected the lrtemplate files on my desktop.
I did that for all of my saved template files and when I was done, I had my complete portfolio framework right there on my Mac with all of the customized changes I had made on my other computer.
It’s probably not every day that you need to move your Lightroom Web Templates around but isn’t it nice to know that you can.
If you would like to look at my “Work in Progress” portfolio site go to RevellPhotography.com
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