HTML with Breeze Browser

[Peter Hilzendegen]

Hi there,

With BB one has the option to mark a set of photos and produce a nice HTML page to present these pictures. I do not intend to present any pictures in the net, but would like to have a kind of a homepage on my disk to view the pictures on such HTML pages.
Questions:

- Setting up single pages is easy to do, but how to get a main page, from which I could click on albums or themes = other pages where I then see the pictures. What I try to say is, I'd have links to click on for e.g. family, nature, animals etc. I don't have clue about HMTL languages or programming etc. and I do not want to have it. Is there a possibility to do that with BB or other easy-to-use software?

- How can I bring pictures from different folders together on on HTML page in BB?

- Can I add pictures to already existing HTML pages in BB?

Thank you for all kind of help.

Ciao, Peter

[ken-w]

Peter Hilzendegen wrote:
- Setting up single pages is easy to do, but how to get a main page, from which I could click on albums or themes = other pages where I then see the pictures.

Hi Peter - what you need for this is a simple HTML editor - there are several around, I can't recommend any since I don't use them (I do web work for a living an use more sophisticated software). A place to start looking might be: www.tucows.com - it has a section of simple to use HTML page makers.

Once you get one, you just need to create a page with a set of links (hyperlinks) to a file by the name of "index.htm" in each of the Breezebrowser HTML folders. The "index.htm" is the main thumbnail image page for each of your Breezebrowser HTML picture pages.

- How can I bring pictures from different folders together on on HTML page in BB?

As far as I know (and I'm not a 100% Breezebrowser expert) - Breezebrowser creates it's HTML pages from pictures in a single folder. So if you want to have pictures from multiple folders in a single folder, you would have to create the folder you want (i.e. birds2002), place all the photos you want to be HTMLed in that folder, and then run the HTML routine.

- Can I add pictures to already existing HTML pages in BB?

Yes and no - using our example of a "birds2002" folder. If you had a some extra photos you wanted to add, you would have to add them to this folder and then run the HTML routine again. Each resulting page from using the Breezebrowser HTML generator is linked to the next, so you can't simply insert a new photo, the HTML routine has to be re-run so that these new photos can be linked.

Another hint is that since Breezebrowser uses the names of the photos to sort the order, it is a good idea to rename you photos into the sort order you want. For example, I did a gallery of boathouses using Breezebrowser: www.rideau-info.com/canal/images-boathouses.html and I renamed all the photos with a prefix of bxx- (i.e. b01- b02- b03- etc.) in order to achieve the sort order I wanted.

Hope this helps a bit.

[Peter Hilzendegen]

Hey Ken,

These are the first concrete answers I receive on this questions, so thank you anyhow. I do have Microsoft Frontpage available, but have not yet installed it. Would that be a easy to use software that I could use for that job? I just did a short search and there seem to be other, more specialized software for this specific job, like Audio Graphics HTML.
It's like always - you have an idea, a small one as you think - and it turns out to be a heck of a job...!

Maybe you can help me also on this related question:

BB contains also so-called multi-index templates. I think I understood that with these you can have several index pages one after the other, where you can jump from forth and back. Is that true? If yes, how does that work, how do I get these multiple pages?

Regards, Peter

By the way: very nice pics, these boat houses.

[ken-w]

Peter Hilzendegen wrote:
questions, so thank you anyhow. I do have Microsoft Frontpage available, but have not yet installed it. Would that be a easy to use software that I could use for that job?

The problem with Frontpage is twofold:

1) For what you want, it is like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

2) It can be confusing, since Frontpage tends to use its own conventions - a simple HTML editor would be much easier to understand I think.

A suggestion might be to download something like the CoffeeCup Free Editor (as it says - it's free). You'll find it on: www.tucows.com/htmlbeginner95.html I've never tried it, but it purports to be easy to use. I'd try this before I loaded up Frontpage (which I have used).

When you create your main "menu page" you'll also have to go into each Breezebrowser folder and edit the "index.htm" file you will find in there to add a hyperlink pointing back to your main menu page (so that when a user goes into a folder to look at the pictures he has a way of finding his way back to the main menu page).

A more efficient alternative is to actually edit the Breezebrowser template you want to use. You may have noticed when you looked at any of the boathouse pictures I have posted, there is a link back to both my main photo gallery and also to my main Rideau menu page on every photo page. I did this by editing the Breezebrowser template so that when I generate the code, each page has these links (so I didn't have to add them afterwards).

For instance, if you know that your main menu page is going to be something like "mainmenu.html" (or my favourite for use on distribution CDROMs "openme.html") and you know that all your photos are going to be one folder down then the link back in the Breezebrowser template will be to: "../mainmenu.html" and you can put a hyperlink with this address back to your "Main Menu" on the template pages so that when you generate the HTML code from Breezebrowser, each page will have a link back to your menu page.

BB contains also so-called multi-index templates. I think I understood that with these you can have several index pages one after the other, where you can jump from forth and back. Is that true? If yes, how does that work, how do I get these multiple pages?

Yes - each multi-index template has a fixed number of images per page (for instance - 12 images). If you had 30 images, then Breezebrowser would automatically create 3 index pages with links between them with 12 thumbnails on the first two and 6 on the last.

The best thing to do is to dump 20 or so test photos into a directory and run all the templates to see what each one does. Once you have run the first one, if you select the option to "reuse existing images" the HTML generation only takes a few seconds.

[Mind Socket]

Try bowsing/searching the BB group archive at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/breezebrowser/

I think this was discussed there a couple of months ago.