• Registered: 2015-05-27
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Advice for SlideShowPro Director Refugee

This may not be an entirely proper place to post this, but maybe someone has some advice?

I've used SlideShowPro and Director to produce slideshows for a site with multiple authors for several years now. For the past couple, it became troublesome that there was no CDN support, but the writing was on the wall. Now that it's been discontinued, I've been looking around for a replacement.

I'm very interested in Juicebox Pro—its slide show interface is most similar to what we produced with SSP, and the way it pulls images from the Wordpress media library is handy, since I've got my library set up on Amazon S3 now.

What I don't like (and I'm hoping there's a workaround for?) is the way galleries are only attached to single posts/pages (correct?)—I'd like to be able to manage galleries separately, and then add them to one or more posts/pages.

I realize I could do this with Flickr or Picasa, but I'd like to avoid going outside the Wordpress back-end again (SSP Director was a separate login, of course, and it'd be nice to move away from that.)

Using NextGEN Gallery is another option, but files uploaded to NextGEN are stored on my server, and there seems to be no support (or reasonable hack) for getting NextGEN to upload to a CDN. So that adds extra bloat with no real benefit—my server's still filling up with photos.

So what's my best bet here? Suck it up, and forget about managing galleries separately?

I've looked at FooGallery, but I'm not a fan of its lightbox display, especially on mobile—even the pro version. But it does arrange photos into galleries that can be dropped into posts/pages with a shortcode. Could Juicebox be tweaked in some way to pull from FooGallery galleries, like it does from NextGEN?

Or—I'm not a fan of this option either, but it might be a compromise—if I had my authors use Juicebox Builder, could we upload the files directly to the CDN, and then point the embed code in Wordpress to them? (Our photos are coming out of Lightroom, anyway...)

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated—especially how I might best be able to wrangle Juicebox Pro into being more what I would like. I've stared at so many gallery plugins and lightboxes that my eyes are glazing over...but I keep coming back to Juicebox...except for that one little hitch. (I'll especially miss being able to group "albums" into "galleries" like we've done here, but the benefit of off-loading a bazillion pictures to a CDN is worth a little creative re-wiring, I guess.)

jmferrell's Website

  • Registered: 2012-04-24
  • Posts: 5,906

Re: Advice for SlideShowPro Director Refugee

What I don't like (and I'm hoping there's a workaround for?) is the way galleries are only attached to single posts/pages (correct?)—I'd like to be able to manage galleries separately, and then add them to one or more posts/pages.

The way that WP-Juicebox currently works is that each gallery is associated with a single page or post and, if the Media Library is used as a source of images, then the images attached to the page or post containing the gallery will be displayed.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to change the way that WP-Juicebox works.
However, rather than try to separate galleries from their pages or posts, it would be possible (with knowledge of PHP and WordPress functionality) to change the way that WP-Juicebox displays Media Library images.
One possible solution might be to tag images in the Media Library (with a third-party plugin which allows such functionality as WordPress does not natively support this) and modify WP-Juicebox so that each gallery displays only images with specified tags. However, this would require a lot of work (and it would work only with a specific tagging plugin of your choice as all tagging plugins use different terms for their tags).

Could Juicebox be tweaked in some way to pull from FooGallery galleries, like it does from NextGEN?

It would certainly be possible to extend WP-Juicebox to use a new source of images (such as FooGallery) but an in-depth knowledge of how FooGallery works would probably be required (at least knowledge of how and where FooGallery stores images or image data) and I am not familiar with this plugin.

if I had my authors use Juicebox Builder, could we upload the files directly to the CDN, and then point the embed code in Wordpress to them?

You could certainly manually embed Juicebox galleries (created by JuiceboxBuilder) in WordPress pages or posts using the baseUrl method of embedding documented here.
Essentially, once you have created a gallery with JuiceboxBuilder-Pro, you would upload the complete gallery folder (not just the contents) to your web server and paste the baseUrl embedding code into the body of your WordPress post (ensuring that the method of entry is 'Text' rather than 'Visual'). It does not matter where on your web server you upload your gallery folder to as long as the two paths in the embedding code (the path to the 'juicebox.js' file and the baseUrl itself, pointing towards the gallery folder) are correct.

(Our photos are coming out of Lightroom, anyway...)

As you are already using Lightroom, maybe you'd like to use the Lightroom plugin (which comes bundled within the Juicebox download zip package) to create your galleries (rather than JuiceboxBuilder). This might be better suited to your current workflow. More information about the Lightroom plugin can be found here.
I don't know if my notes above will actually help but I hope they might at least clarify a few things or point you in the right direction.

  • Registered: 2015-05-27
  • Posts: 2

Re: Advice for SlideShowPro Director Refugee

Thanks for the reply!—Yes, that's very helpful. I think I might give the Lightroom plugin a try; our galleries are pretty much static once they're created (nothing more added or removed) so that might be the best option.

jmferrell's Website

  • Registered: 2015-07-20
  • Posts: 11

Re: Advice for SlideShowPro Director Refugee

Hey, Jim.

I'm also a Director refugee. I had to come up with alternative solutions for a bunch of my clients. And I recently had security issues with regards to SSP Director installations. I'm not sure if that played into them abandoning it but regardless I needed something to take its place. I have been using JuiceBox for a couple years and it is probably the best thing out there for building galleries. I've set up a couple of my clients with the JuiceBox Flickr load for managing their content and they seem to like it.

I also discovered that you can use Instagram to post to Flickr and that works even better because most all of my clients use Instagram (but not so much Flickr) and they can post to both accounts simultaneously. So, it's a super easy way for them to add content to their galleries. And you don't need to set up databases, etc. I'm super pleased with JuiceBox and have purchased 2 multiple site licenses. Let me know if you come up with any other solutions.