General • Installation • HTML Tips • Captions • Special items • Sections
HTML window • HTML settings • Theme Fields
Template files • assets files • Regeneration

General

The EOS template can be used with iView MediaPro version 2.6 or 3. If still you use iView MediaPro 2.6 then please follow this link!

If you use iView MediaPro 3.0 then please upgrade to version 3.1 and follow this link. iView has changed the path setup with that release which means you also need to update the EOS template!

Before you start working with the template you should get comfortable with generating web galleries in iView. Check the iView PDF documentation for more information. In addition there is a special Help file available: → Documents/English/Examples HTML/About_templates.html. If you have a specific question regarding the application itself (not EOS related) then please post to the iView Multimedia forum. Though this is not a support forum you should get help from other users or the iView staff.


Installation for iView MediaPro

You can download the template file from the Yahoo! group's Files section. After extracting the ZIP file you must copy the EOS folder into the HTML Templates directory of your iView installation.

  • Mac OS 9:
    → System Folder/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/HTML Templates/
  • Mac OS X:
    → ~User/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/HTML Templates/
    or
    → Network/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/HTML Templates/
  • Windows:
    → C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\iView\Plug-ins\HTML Templates\
    or
    → C:\Program Files\iView MediaPro\Plug-ins\HTML Templates\
The latter is the place where all the standard templates are located (as shown in the screenshot below). However it may be possible that your changes get lost during an iView upgrade. So the first path (Application Data) is the safer one.



Make sure that the subdirectory "assets" exists in the EOS folder. Sometimes this structure gets lost when you do not use a proper unzip tool. Note that you can rename the EOS folder without affecting the functionality. That means you can install multiple versions of the EOS template if you like.

iView sometimes uses the term themes instead of templates. Don't be confused, it's the same thing.


Important:

The template part is now installed. But you cannot create a gallery yet because since version 2.5 of the EOS template a shared settings concept is used. Please read 'How to set up an EOS project' now. Then come back to read some tips for the gallery generation with iView.


HTML generation tips

You should be familiar with iView MediaPro's gallery generation feature. If not, please read the iView documentation first. There are some special tasks necessary before you start making the HTML gallery, see below.

Start iView MediaPro and select a Catalog (or create one). You can sort the images using drag & drop. Note that all visible images will be used for the web gallery. If you want to show only a subset then select the images of your choice and then select "Show Selected" from the Find menu. Now only the selected ones are visible and will show up in the web gallery.


Add Image Captions/Descriptions

If you want to add image descriptions then you have to write the text in the Caption field. See the screenshot in the next section for an example. The position of the caption text in the gallery can be defined in the EOS settings file. Note that this field can either be named "Caption" or "Description", depending on your setting of the "Field Names". You can change the setting if you go to Edit → Preferences... → General. I recommend to go with the IPTC Core names.



It is important to know that until iView MediaPro v2.6 all special characters were replaced with HTML conform entities.

Examples are:
< became &lt;
> became &gt;
" became &quot;
[new line] became <br \>
It was possible to suppress the substitution process if you checked "Treat captions as raw HTML" in the HTML settings window, in order to use HTML code in the Caption but the new lines were always replaced with the HTML entity <br \>. That was fine.

Since iView MediaPro v3.0.1 it is not possible anymore to convert special characters into HTML conform entities! The checkbox "Treat captions as raw HTML" in the HTML settings has absolutely no effect.

Here is the bummer: if you write a double quote or a line break in the Caption field the web page will not work since it breaks the Javascript code! You have to eliminate those characters from your image captions or you revert to iView MediaPro v2.6.

I have reported this behavior to iView and posted in the iView forum but got no response so far. I don't expect to get one. I never do.

Define Special Items

Usually each photo is shown with a fixed set of items (e.g. print sizes). Sometimes it is necessary to add a special item to the list, like a bigger print size for very sharp photos. It is also possible to show a completely different set of items for a photo. These so-called "special items" are setup in the EOS template settings and won't be explained here in detail. However it is necessary to store a piece of information within the image data to tell the template which items should get displayed for this photo. This is done using the Annotations field "Title" or "Headline". The naming of this field depends on the "Field Names" settings (see above). The screenshot below shows a comparision of the Annotations between iView MediaPro 2.6 (left) and 3.0 (right) using the "IPTC Core" setting.



In this example the special item "CD-ROM" is defined. More information regarding Special Items can be found in the F.A.Q. in the Yahoo! group.

Note that in other applications these text fields are called IPTC data. Annotations is an iView proprietary term.


Create Sections

Sections are nothing but a different way of navigation. You can also call them sub-galleries, topics or chapters. Instead of showing the thumbnails on several pages you can split the gallery into different sections. You can offer the page navigation as well or just the sections. The best thing is that a section overview page is automatically generated, showing the first image of each section, it's title and the amount of photos within the sections.

Here is how it is done: order the images in iView by the topic you want to use as sections (can be events, locations, names, date, time, e.t.c.). Then select all images of one topic and enter the section name in the Annotations field "Instructions". If you have filled out the section names for all photos you are ready to (re-)generate the gallery. Just make sure that the variable "useSections" is set to 1 or 2 in the EOS settings (filename "settings.js").

In the screenshot above you will see that the section name "Special items" was entered for the CD image. That means all images with that section title will be shown in a virtual subfolder called "Special items".

If you work with sections I recommend to display the Instructions value below the thumbnails. That give a better overview. In the screenshot below I have used different color labels for better visibility. Labels are not related to sections.



HTML Dialog Window

Note that the previous mentioned tips are completely optional! You can also start the web gallery generator right after you have downloaded the photos to your computer.

The next step is to open the HTML window: Make → HTML Gallery...



A window similar to the one below will appear:



Here you can enter a Site Title (used for this gallery) at the top. Alternatively you can use the folder name as title (requires to modify the EOS settings, v2.5 only).

Don't forget to choose the EOS template from the list of themes.

Note: Leave the Index Table settings at their default values! It is necessary for the EOS template to work properly. You can set the index cell layout in the EOS settings instead.

Now click on "Create..." and a window will pop up which asks you for the output folder. Enter your EOS project folder plus a gallery folder name of your choice. It's important that the gallery is at the same directory level as your "eoscommon" folder. (You could change that if you edit the file "dirsetup.js" in the assets folder of your gallery.)

Click on "OK" and start the process. The output directory will be created (if it does not exists) and all files from the EOS template folder "assets" will be copied as well. The gallery will be shown in a browser window if you have checked "Launch browser when done...".

HTML Settings

Usually it is not necessary to make changes in the HTML settings window for the EOS template. Just make sure that the extension is set to either htm or html. Furthermore it is not recommended to treat captions as raw HTML. The advantage is that you can add HTML code in the image description but the huge disadvantage is that the Javascript code gets corrupted when you use the wrong quotes in the captional text. See also the paragraph "Add image captions" above.



Furthermore you can set the JPG quality of the web sized images and add a watermark image.

Theme fields

In the Theme Fields window you can set two more variables. First one is the header size in pixels. Just click on the name and enter the new value at the bottom and click the Change button. Usually you will leave this variable at it's default value once you have adjusted your logo image to the header size. The default value can be changed at the top of the file "index.html" in the template folder.

The second one is called Gallery ID. You can use it for general information about the gallery. This variable is not visible to the client. It will only appear in the order index table. If you enter the date of the event for example you can sort your orders by that field. Or you enter the type of event or the photographer's name. It's main reason is that you can group the orders by that value.



Template Files

Template files are files which get scanned by the HTML generator. The field phrases get replaced and rules will be applied to build a complete HTML gallery. There exists only one copy per template file in the template folder. However during the HTML generation process the image template gets applied to every image in your gallery, resulting in multiple image files (one per image) in the output folder.

Template
Type 		File name in
Template Folder 		File name(s) in
Output Folder 		Amount
frame frame.html index.htm 1
index index.html index1.htm 1
image media.html source/<image-name>.htm one per
image

Additional Files in the "assets" subfolder

This folder containes a few gallery specific files. They do not fit in the common folder because their content is usually different for each gallery. They get copied unchanged to the output directory in the subfolder "assets". Check the EOS settings file for more information.

Important notice:

Since iView MediaPro 3.0 the complete "assets" folder gets copied to the output folder in TWO DIFFERENT locations!! Note that their content is IDENTICAL, but only one of the two folders is used for the EOS template! Make all your changes in the FIRST one:
<output folder>/assets/
<output folder>/source/assets/

The other one in the "source" subfolder WILL BE IGNORED. You can delete it if you like. I'm sorry for this pitfall - I don't know what the iView programmer was smoking when he coded this lazy solution...

Regenerate the Gallery

You need to re-generate the gallery when you make changes in...

  • ... the image order.
  • ... the image file names.
  • ... the image selection (add or omit some).
  • ... the Annotations data of the images.
  • ... the HTML settings, like title, size, watermark or quality.
  • ... any of the three EOS template files (see above).

If you edit a file in the EOS template "assets" subfolder you have copy the file to the "assets" subfolder in the output directory afterwards. Regenerating the gallery would have the the same effect but it takes takes much longer. Of course, you can also edit the file directly in the "assets" subfolder in output directory but if you forget to copy it back to the template folder your changes will be lost after the next regeneration of the gallery. Changes in the "eoscommon" folder can be made any time and do not require a regeneration.

Note that always a new gallery is created and all existing data will be overwritten. iView is not able to use the available images, like other applications do. This can be a real pain when you need to regenerate a gallery. If your gallery has several hundred images it can take hours where other applications only needs a few seconds for the same task.

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