I wish I had the $25.00 I just spent to upgrade Rapidweaver and the $10.00 I just spent to upgrade the Blocks plugin and the $18.00 I just spent for RWMultitool and the $45.00 I spent on three RW themes just so I could break out of the cookie-cutter designs that are included with RW. Not to mention the money I spent buying them all in the first place. There is more, but I hurts me to talk about it. I could have spent $40 on Shutterbug and been much better off.
I usually use Dreamweaver, but I wanted to try something new, have more options for quick and dirty sites. I've had Rapidweaver for a while and used it very little. I've spent the last three days really digging in and creating a couple of sites and trying almost every aspect of it. I tried to rebuild a site I already had created on Dreamweaver to see if I could possibly use RW in its place. Finally, yesterday afternoon, I quit RW and resorted to Dreamweaver.
This morning, I got the MacUpdate email saying Shutterbug had been updated and I dutifully downloaded it again, since it was on my Watch List and I had downloaded it a couple of months ago, played with it for about 30 minutes and that was that. This time, I put far more time into it and I am floored. I am also mad as hell at myself for not working more with it sooner -- live and learn. It is so EASY to change EVERYTHING in the themes! When I think of the time I spent changing the CSS files and the image files in RW to make the theme more like what I wanted ... please, somebody shoot me now.
ImageWell is built right into Shutterbug -- and I've been using ImageWell as a standalone -- so you can edit your images from within Shutterbug. You can add flash, Quicktime movies, extra HTML ... and it's all so easy. I applied a couple of new themes, just checking them out, making all kinds of changes, then asked it to revert. Shutterbug gave me all kinds of options! Do I want to revert to the first saved version or the autosaved version after I switched to the second theme or the autosave after I switch to the second theme ... how cool is that!
As with anything like this, there is a learning curve, but I can see myself getting done in less than a day what took me three days to do in RW.
I am so sorry that I let the name mislead me. I put off working with it because I thought I don't do that much with photo galleries. Don't make the same costly mistakes I made. Check out Shutterbug -- REALLY check it out.