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As big fans of Adobe Lightroom 2 we discovered the awesome TTG plugins some months ago. The plugins are written for the WEB module of Adobe Lightroom 2 and add tremendous value and functionality to the software. Personally speaking, without TTG’s Highslide Gallery Pro I wouldn’t be selling nearly as many prints to my clients as I do, because with the plugin I am able to build beautiful, functional, and cross-compatible galleries with a built-in shopping cart. It has been a real godsend for me and thousands of photographers that use Adobe Lightroom 2 as their primary workflow tool.

The Turning Gate, aka TTG, has recently upgraded one of their plugins (well, honestly, they are updating their plugins all the time, always tweaking things and making them better and better), a plugin that should, in my opinion, be bundled with their other plugins because it is a powerful too that adds a lot to the actual creation of complete Adobe Lightroom 2 websites, not just a photo galleries. The plugin is called TTG Pages (version 3), and it will streamline your Adobe Lightroom 2 to website workflow in ways you might find hard to believe.

What TTG Pages Is

Well, first, let me tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a plugin that creates photo galleries, for that there are plugins that go by the names of TTG Highslide, TTG Horizon, TTG Shadowbox, and others. What TTG Pages IS is a plugin that creates a Home page, an About page, a Contact page (with an email submission form), and an automatic indexing function for your photo galleries. And you create all of these pages from within Adobe Lightroom 2.

The reason why this plugin is, or at least should be, a companion plugin to any other TTG plugin you may own is that it creates these pages in a way that makes perfect accompanying pages to the galleries you create with other TTG plugins. They work off the same templates, for the most part, so it’s easy to match color, font, width, height, and so forth. If you happen to use TTG Highslide Pro for instance, you can choose several of the identical templates designed by the TTG team.

TTG Pages is about designing pages that will function as your official Home page, About page, etc, and all within Adobe Lightroom 2, and will, or can, match the look and feel of the gallery you’ve designed with a TTG gallery plugin. Together they work to create a complete website that is compatible across browsers and operating systems.

Indexing Galleries

Before you even consider buying this plugin you should head over to the TTG website (http://lightroom.theturninggate.net) and watch the demonstration video they’ve created so you have a firm grasp on what the plugin does, and does not do. While creating the Home, About, and Contact page is pretty straightforward, the Gallery Indexing feature is a powerful action that might deserve a little attention.

If you’ve been using TTG gallery plugins with Adobe Lightroom 2 for a while you’ve probably built up a number of photo galleries on your computer or on your website. When you Introduce TTG Pages into your workflow you’ve brought your entire website into Adobe Lightroom 2, and without an auto indexing feature how in the world would you connect all these galleries? Manually? Really? Using TTG Pages you are able to use the plugin and pull together all the galleries, build an index page that matches the look and feel of your galleries, all without having to connect them manually, link by link by link. It’s a huge benefit and one of the coolest features of TTG Pages I’ve seen.

There are some ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ you need to know about when using TTG Pages, and watching the demo video on the TTG site shows you what they are and how to make sure you’re maximizing the benefits of the plugin.

For instance, because TTG Pages creates 3 pages, Home, About, and Contact, you must have at least 3 photos selected in Adobe Lightroom 2 so that TTG Pages can use them in those pages. Of course, you don’t have to use photos if you don’t want to, you can use nothing at all (with a little manual editing) or you can substitute the photos with flash movies.

Putting it all together…

Once you have built your pages and are happy with them you will want to export them. TTG Pages exports the pages into a folder/directory, and inside that folder/directory is a folder/directory called “galleries”. If you’ve created photo galleries with other templates inside of Adobe Lightroom 2 they should be copied to this folder/directory. Any gallery built with a TTG gallery engine and enabled for use with the auto index plugin will automatically appear in your gallery index after you’ve published your website.

Bottom Lining It…

My first experience with a TTG plugin was with Highslide Pro plugin, one that creates awesome photo galleries with tons of features. Highslide and Highslide Pro automatically sets up a Home, About, and Contact “link” in the Header menu. When I first encountered that I was not yet aware of TTG Pages (despite it being at version 3), so when I saw those links I thought I would need to go into the actual code and either get rid of them or manually link them to pages I would make in Dreamweaver. Not a bad deal I thought, since I have experience building website it didn’t bother me. However, the forward-thinking TTG people created this little feature in Highslide to work with TTG Pages so the linking is already set up for it.

When I did discover TTG Pages I discovered that I now had at my disposal a complete website building tool that allowed me to create complete websites from within Adobe Lightroom 2, all in short order. So, I immediately began thinking about my fellow photographers that didn’t know anything about building websites and didn’t want to know anything about building websites. Would these plugins give the power for designing attractive, fully functional websites to those that want to spend their time behind the camera and not in front of a computer using Dreamweaver. The answer is yet, of course.

Every digital photographer, without exception, should be using Adobe Lightroom 2. Every digital photographer, without question, should also pick up a few plugins from The Turning Gate, including TTG Pages, if they publish to the Internet.
The Turning Gate has, with version 3, combined the power of the older TTG Pages, TTG Auto Index, and TTG Stage, and together it is a formidable plugin. That said, as much as I love this plugin, and use this plugin, I would love to see The Turning Gate go one step further. I would think that adding a good photo gallery plugin, like Highslide but not Highslide, to TTG Page and rebranding it something like TTG WebBuilder or some such thing, it would simplify things even further than they already have. Imagine being able to create a new catalog in Adobe Lightroom 2, click on the Web module link, then click the TTG WebBulilder link, and from there pick and choose to design a complete website, with galleries, a homepage, about page, and a contact page, along with an index page, and even the ability to reach beyond Adobe Lightroom 2, onto your desktop, and grab a flash movie to insert into the TTG Pages, and you suddenly have the complete solution to building a website.

Using a TTG plugin to create and publish a photo gallery is about the easiest thing you can do with Adobe Lightroom 2. The flexibility of TTG’s plugins allow you to spend as much, or as little, time as you want tweaking the look of your gallery. When you publish it you can type the URL into your browser and see the thumbnail page as the first, or home, page on your site. However, first timers might get confused when trying to implement TTG Pages into the mix. Using TTG Pages gives you the power to go another step and when you publish the end result you go to the TTG Pages Home page instead of the thumbnail page of your photo gallery. A couple of staff members here in the office have expressed to me that they were not sure how to implement TTG Pages if they already had some galleries created by another TTG plugin online. It is not apparent that to do so you only need to publish your TTG Pages, move your galleries into the “galleries” directory of your TTG Pages directory (confused yet?) and then upload it all to your server. By building a gallery plugin into TTG Page and rebranding it as a complete solution would, I think, give Adobe Lightroom 2 users a huge head start with publishing their own websites created from within Adobe Lightroom 2.

All in all though, if you are already using a TTG gallery plugin then TTG Pages is a no-brainer; you need this plugin and it will be the best $25 you’ve ever spent (on software). If you are about to purchase your first TTG gallery plugin then by all means pick up TTG Pages at the same time and learn to use them together.
To see just how powerful these plugins can be head over to The Turning Gate and see how cool it can really be.

Julia Barnes

Click Here To Watch A Short Demo By Julia Showing TTG Pages in Lightroom

Addendum October 30, 2009

This review was lost for a couple of weeks. Since we first wrote it the people over at the The Turning Gate have put together some handy videos and slideshows showing off the power of these plugins. Where we needed to, we’ve gone back into this article and inserted the proper URL’s. has also released a public beta of Adobe Lightroom 2 v3 and we’ve experienced exactly ZERO problems with all the TTG plugins we’re running.

Now go. Get the plugins. You’ll thank me. – JB