Flash Album Exporter is an export plug-in for Apple Aperture that streamlines the creation of web galleries built around the trio of freeware Flash solutions from Airtight Interactive: SimpleViewer, PostcardViewer and AutoViewer.

 

Flash Album Exporter 0.9, developed by Ken Welch and currently available as donationware, enables a selection of pictures in Aperture to be exported to one of these three types of web galleries, with control over a selection of the typical parameters for each, such as the width of the photo border, output destination and the Aperture output preset.

 

SimpleViewer, PostcardViewer and AutoViewer all represent fun, slick ways to display photos in a web browser, ones we've used for several years for personal pictures mostly. In our testing so far with Flash Album Exporter, it does make it dead simple to turn a series of photos in Aperture into one of these three types of galleries.

 

In v0.9 of Welch's plug-in, most of the settings don't persist from session to session, and the AutoViewer export is for some reason creating undersized photos (Update, February 16, 2007: we subsequently resolved this AutoViewer problem by changing the DPI in the image export preset to 72).

 

Plus, as with many web gallery creation tools, we can only get the pictures looking as crisp as we want by sizing and sharpening the source photos in Photoshop prior to export from Aperture through Flash Album Exporter.

 

Flash Album Exporter requires Aperture 1.5.2 for Mac.

 

Here are examples of SimpleViewer (left) and PostcardViewer (right) galleries we've created with Flash Album Exporter. The photos are of the youngest member of the staff here at Little Guy Media.

 

    

 

An example of an AutoViewer gallery is here. Things to note: with all three gallery types, the arrow keys can be used to navigate through the pictures (after clicking once). Plus, the main photo in a SimpleViewer gallery will automatically resize smaller as the browser window is shrunk.