How To Use ACDSee

1. 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.

2. Place the photos you want to include in the gallery in a folder on your hard drive.

3. Choose an empty folder or create a new one to use as a destination folder for the files created by the Photo Gallery command.

4. Open ACDSee. You can download here

5. Navigate to the folder containing your pictures in the folder tree pane of ACDSee. The images will be displayed in the thumbnail pane.

6. Type Ctrl-A to select all the images.

7. Go to Plug-ins > HTML Album Generator. (If this option is not available you either do not have the correct version of ACDSee, or you did not install the Album Generator plug-in when you installed ACDSee.)

8. In the dialog box, choose a format for the Thumbnail images. For photos, choose JPEG. The settings button allows you to adjust the compression level. Unless the thumbnails turn out poorly, you can leave this setting alone.

9. Choose a size for the thumbnails. They will be sized porportionally with the dimensions you specifiy as the maximum. 100 x 100 pixels is typically a good size.

10. For Page Settings, enter numbers for the columns and rows for the thumbnail arrangement.
Enter a title that will appear at the top of the page and in the browser's title bar.
Click the Page Colors button to customize the colors of your background, text, and links in the page.

11. In the Output section, click the browse button and navigate to the empty folder you created in step 3. Leave Overwrite set to Ask, and check both boxes (copy source images to output folder and launch Web browser to view output).

12. The last section can be left alone because we chose to copy source images to the output folder in the previous step.

13. Click OK and the HTML pages and thumbnails will be created.

Tips:
ACDSee creates a HTML pages, thumbnail images, and copies the original full-size files to the same folder. If more than one page is required, the pages will be named consecutively (i.e. page_01.htm, page_02.htm, etc.)

You can upload the entire destination folder to your Web sever as-is, or open the html page(s) in a Web page editor to change their appearance.

ACDSee creates links directly to the full-size images. When you click an image or hyperlink in the thumbnail page, the full-size image will open in the same browser window.
Your thumbnail pages can consist of selected images instead of an entire folder. Instead of choosing select all in step 6, hold the Ctrl key down and click on each of the images you want to include.

It's a good idea to rename all the images before creating a photo gallery. See the link below for step-by-step instructions for ACDSee's rename command.