If it wasn’t entirely obivous when you first looked at the page, here’s a how-to article to help you create those custom photo pages I inlcude in many of my templates… the ones that look like this:

Figure 1

The written instructions are below, but you might enjoy watching the process in this video. I cover all the steps necessary to create a very cool interactive photo gallery for your viewers. You can do this!

This is a manual process. Apple doesn’t include any kind of widget to do this… yet… so we have to fake it for now. The first thing you want to do is assemble your photos in a place where it’s easy to access them, either in a single folder or in iPhoto. You’ll also want to create thumbnail versions - smaller versions of the originals, no bigger than 150 pixels wide. Here we go.

1. Create a new page using the template you see in the picture above, Figure 1.
2. Drop your first photo into the main picture placeholder to replace the photo in the template.
3. Either create another photo page using the template or simply duplicate this page you just created.
4. Drop your second photo into the main picture slot of this page.
5. Go back to step 1 and repeate this until you have pages for every photo you want to display. If that’s complete, then continue.
6. Go back to your first photo page and this time, drop the thumbnail versions of your pictures in the thumbnail slots underneath the main picture. If you need more than 12 thumbnails, copy and paste those that are already on the screen. DO NOT drop the original sized photos into the thumbnail slots or the page will load incredibly slowly when you try to view it.
7. Once you have all the thumbnails in place, you have to manually hyperlink them to the individual pages you created in the first steps. Do that now.
8. If all your thumbnails are hyperlinked to the right picture pages, then all you need to do is copy them all and paste them onto the other photo pages, deleting those that are already on the page before pasting the new ones. Now all your photo pages will have the same thumbnails and all of them will be hyperlinked to the right pages.
9. The last step is to update just two arrorws. Go to your first photo page and click on the left arrow (it’s on the left side of the big picture).
10. Change the hyperlink for that arrow so that it points to the LAST photo page in your series.
11. Now go to the last photo page in your series and click on the right arrow.
12. Change the hyperlink for this arrow so that it points to the FIRST photo page in your series. This way, if people use your arrows, they will loop through just your pictures and not the rest of the pages on your site.

CONGRATULTAIONS!

You’ve successfully created your nice photo series. Yeah, it’s a bit of work, but if you keep the number of photos in the series to 18 or fewer, it’s not too bad. Hopefully we’ll see some nice widgets like this in upcoming iWeb releases, but for now, we’ll fake it.