Pete Bacheler’s SmugMug site uses a very minimalist slideshow for the homepage and a simple dark background for his gallery pages.

Fernando Leoni’s fine art photography SmugMug website features a unique slider effect on the homepage and incorporates an external form for his customers to order his images.

The Vaughn Arnold Photography SmugMug customization is available as a custom theme from DVISO. Contact us to find out how to use this theme on your SmugMug Pro website.

The John de Guzman photography website features a full browser window slideshow and a simple dark background for his gallery pages.

Tony Berru’s SmugMug website uses a clean light background to frame his images.  This design is available as a custom theme from DVISO. Contact us to find out how to use this theme on your SmugMug Pro website.

The Hotchkiss Group SmugMug customization uses a unique multiple direction slideshow on the homepage.

The Shutter 51 Photography SmugMug Customization incorporates a clean dark design and a image overlay on galleries with a coupon code.

It was time for a makeover of my SmugMug galleries. I wanted to simplify it and update the look. The homepage incorporates SmugMug’s built-in slideshow feature.

I’m wrapping up work on seaverphotography.com, a custom SmugMug and WordPress integration for Keven Seaver Photography. The site highlights her photography and integrates her blog and image galleries. It’s great to work with photographers like Keven to find ways to showcase their art.

My recent SmugMug customization for Michael McGinnis Photography includes a slideshow on the homepage which uses SlideshowPro for Flash to automatically pull images from one of Mike’s galleries, using the gallery rss feed. This integration between a SmugMug gallery and SlideshowPro was a little easier said than done. Creating the slideshow in Flash is a snap, thanks to SlideshowPro, but when you place the .swf on the customized SmugMug page, issues arise. Most frustratingly, everything seems fine when you preview the slideshow in Flash. The images load and everything looks great. But when you you try to view the same slideshow online, it breaks.

The solution (for me, at least) lies in properly constructing the URL for the media RSS feed. Normal SmugMug gallery feeds look something like this:

http://www.darrenhendricks.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=10046805_nR5QF&format=rss200

As long as you’ve checked the box to allow external links in the SmugMug gallery settings, your images will load when you test the movie in Flash. However, when you try to publish the slideshow and display it on your SmugMug page, you’ll wonder what happened. No images!

Luckily, I found this file in SlidshowPro’s documentation: http://wiki.slideshowpro.net/SSPfl/CP-RSSFeedNotLoading

Security limitations imposed by Flash don’t allow the RSS feed to be displayed. Fortunately, a couple changes to the URL fix the problem. We need to change the URL to the following format:

http://api.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=10046805_nR5QF&format=rss200&Sandboxed=1

Note the change to “api.smugmug.com” and the addition of the “Sandboxed=1″ parameter. You may also want to add a size parameter to the URL: “&size=Original” (or Small, Large, etc).

In your SmugMug Bio, or wherever you choose to display the slideshow, a basic method of embedding the .swf file looks something like this:

<object width=”800″ height=”525″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.dviso.com/slideshow/Slideshow.swf”>
<param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”wmode” value=”opaque” />
<embed src=”http://www.dviso.com/slideshow/Slideshow.swf” width=”800″ height=”525″ quality=”high” wmode=”opaque”></embed>
</object>

This may not be the only way, or the best way to get SlideshowPro for Flash working with your SmugMug gallery, but it has worked for me. Feel free to share your experiences or methods for integrating SlidshowPro with SmugMug.