Photoshop Image Farming

Problem.

In the present version of Adobe GoLive 5.0, there is a nifty feature called Rollover buttons. This uses GoLive actions to automatically create Javascript rollover buttons as part of your page design. The rollover contains images for different states; and the Javascript switches the image inside the web browser. In the present version of Adobe GoLive, 5.0, the images must be GIF or JPEG images. There is a new GoLive 5.0 feature of SmartObjects, where you can directly place Adobe Photoshop “.psd” files onto your pages.

Unfortunately in GoLive 5.0 there is no mechanism of using Photoshop images as part of Rollovers.

But there is a workaround that has other side benefits.

I call it “Farming” your .PSD files into one placeholder HTML page in your GoLive 5.0 site. You still obtain the benefit of SmartObjects: automatic updating and dynamic scaling, changing optimisation settings and output file management.

Solution.

Workaround is to create a “Photoshop Farm File.” This is simply a .html file in your web site.

1. Create a new HTML file in your web site, and set the Publish to “Never”

When this file is set to “Publish: Never” it ensures the HTML file is never sent to the web server, as there is no need to place it on the server. Click on the icon of the file in the site window, and in the Inspector you can set the status.

2. Open the new farm HTML file and drag and drop/place your Photoshop files into this document.

Set the appropriate settings, dimensions, compression using the Save for Web dialog box

Save resulting file to directory in your site.

Now that the Photoshop files are SmartObjects, you get the benefits of resizing, editing the original Photoshop file.

3. In your HTML page that is going to contain the real rollover, create your smart rollovers as normal, but pointing to the JPEG/GIF output from the ranch file above.

There are some potential downsides to using Farm files:

You need to open the ranch file to update if the psd updates (this also is potentially a time saver when designing)

GoLive 5.0 cannot have more than 2 output files from the same source file (GoLive only updates the first smartobject of the file occurance) — send in request to golivewishlist@adobe.com!

Extensions

With a little more courage and time, you could write an extendscript to “corral” all SmartObjects into “farms” to one-stop editing

This will also work with Adobe Illustrator 9 files, too!

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