Media Center Plus 3 is a multimedia management and cataloging program. The HTML Export command can be used to automatically generate advanced HTML pages to display your photo collections on the Web. (Please note that Media Center Plus has been discontinued as of April 2003. Jasc has replaced this product with Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album.)
Difficulty: Average
Time Required: 15 minutes
Here's How:
- Prepare your photos for the Web by rotating, cropping, resizing, and color correcting, if necessary. Refer to the related information in the links below for tips on prepping your pictures.
- Choose an empty folder or create a new one to use as a destination folder for the files created by the HTML Export command.
- Open Media Center Plus.
- Create a new album and add the photos you'd like to include, or open an existing album if you have already created it. Keep in mind that the Album title will appear at the top of your HTML pages when you export them.
- Go to File > Export > HTML.
- Type a filename for the pages that will be created. This will be the prefix for all the HTML files that will be created. To ensure compatibility with all Web servers, use all lowercase letters and do not use spaces or punctuation.
- For the output directory, click browse, and navigate to the folder you created in step 2.
- In the HTML design, you only have one option, so leave it as is. (I can only assume the drop down menu is there to accomodate additional templates in future versions.)
- In the Web formats section, select Common Web-compatible Types from the menu, and check the box to exclude files not in Web formats.
- For the range, select all thumbnails (unless you selected individual images to include before using the export command).
- Under Linking, choose the option to copy media files to output directory.
- In the Design-specific fields, type the address of a Web site that you'd like to link to as the home page, and choose the number of seconds for the slideshow delay.
- Click OK to create the HTML pages and thumbnails.
Tips:
- Media Center Plus will create several files and place them all in the output directory. The entire contents of the output folder can be uploaded to your Web server.
- HTML pages created by Media Center Plus use frames, Javascript, and other advanced features that may not be supported by all browsers.
- To preview the Web site before uploading, open the .htm file that corresponds with the name you used for the filename in step 6. (If you entered "pictures" for the filename, you'll want to open the pictures.htm file.)
- If you add comments and keywords to the images in your album prior to exporting, this information will be included in the HTML pages created by Media Center Plus.
- When you click a thumbnail, it will open a larger view of the image in another frame. Clicking this larger view will open the full-size image in a new browser window automatically sized to fit the image.
