According to the increasing use of mobile devices, jAlbum raised its number of responsive designed skins lately. One of the new responsive skins is "Responsive", which focuses on a responsive design as well as an easy way to embed the skin into other websites.

 

What is responsive design?

Responsive design adjusts the size of the content to the current device you are watching the application on in a way that it fits to the surroundings. Responsive design places importance on the interaction between the device and the application and applies different navigation styles for touch devices, desktop devices etc. With the help of responsive design you can show your galleries easily to your friends using mobile devices where ever you are.

 

What is the difference between a JavaScript embedding compared to an iframe embedding?

Iframe embedding has a static size which is difficult to change. It just includes a piece of another website on a certain position into your website. JavaScript embedding is responsive embedding. It can adjust itself easily to the structure and appearance of the website you want to embed the album in. It also allows you to view images in full screen, adopt font families, background colors as well as other style elements.

 

Why should you use the new skin “Responsive”?

The skin “Responsive” provides a decent looking responsive design which focuses on simplicity and plainness. It also provides JavaScript embedding as well as video support, touch support and different styles which can be easily adjusted in the jAlbum software. Responsive is made for users who already have a website build with different other website building tools or website building helpers like WordPress, Bootstrap, Yola and others.

 

What would be a good usage example for “Responsive”?

If you manage a football club website and you want to showcase pictures of different games  but do not know how to showcase them in a proper way here is what you can do. Get jAlbum, organize your images with the help of the software which can handle tons of images easily, choose the responsive skin, select a special skin design of your choice, click make Album, upload the album, pick the generated JavaScript code from the "Share" tab and copy it to your preferred location of your own website. You and visitor of your website will have the ability to comment on each picture of your gallery using the jAlbum widget.

 

Interested in implementing your own responsive skin?

Check out the single page web album entry in the development center!

 

Here are two examples how the website could look like:

WordPress example        Bootstrap example

 

What are you waiting for? Get jAlbum and get started!!!

Download links:      

 

After a long wait, we’re proud to present jAlbum 13 to you. In this blog we’re going to talk about two improvements that stand out:

  1. Collaborative albums
  2. Powerful file organizer

Fair licenses

Before moving more into these improvements, let’s first mention the license terms: As promised in our blog post from Feb 25, we have added a 12 months support & update plan to all those who have purchased a v12 license, starting from the date of purchase. This means that those who purchased a jAlbum 12 license after October 28, 2014 are entitled to a free update to v13.0! The license badge on your profile page and on the “About jAlbum” dialog in our software will tell how long your support & update plan is valid. Those who have an older v12 license get 50% discount when they purchase a new license, (which includes a 12 months support & update plan). Those who have v11 licenses get 30% discount when they can purchase a new license, (which includes a 12 months support & update plan). The discounts are automatically deducted from the price when you go to the checkout page. Just ensure you’re signed in.

Collaborative albums

With jAlbum 13 we’ve made it easier to manage albums where several people contribute with images. You now have an email address in the format username@jalbum.net (usable only for collaborative albums, not for regular email). This email address can be attached to one or many collaborative album projects.

Images mailed to such addresses appear automatically in the respective album project. When jAlbum running, this happens in the background. You will be notified to your ordinary email address when new images have been submitted. The subject line tells what album project to add images to. Captions can be added by simply writing a line of text below each attached image. (Captions embedded in the image files are also respected). Once you no longer wish to allow images to be mailed to an album project, you simply detach the email address from it. jAlbum keeps track on who contributed which images, indicated by a small “head” status icon next to each thumbnail image. Once you upload or update a collaborative album using jAlbum, contributors are notified via email that there has been an update to an album where they have contributed images. Here’s our first collaborative album that YOU are invited to contribute to.

Powerful file organizer

jAlbum is appreciated by many who manage huge amounts of images, still the focus has been on presenting images and not organizing them. With jAlbum 13, we think you will find jAlbum being a great file organizer too. If you already have all your images organized in well labeled folder structures and no duplicates, you can stop reading this, but if you’re like me, having images spanning several years in various folders on my network drive and local computers, with many duplicate images taking up disk space, then jAlbum 13 comes to the rescue. Selected objects can be automatically organized into folders based on camera date, name or place (GPS location). You are presented with many choices and keyboard shortcuts to make the organization process flexible and quick.

To organize an existing album project, open it and select the objects to organize, then right click and select “Organize”. To organize existing images on disk, drop your images folder onto jAlbum when no project is open and select “Use folder”. jAlbum will now work directly on those files, meaning that any change within jAlbum actually applies to that physical folder. If you’re not comfortable with this, simply organize copies or links within existing album projects. You can also have jAlbum organize the folder structure of the generated album only, leaving the location of the original images untouched. If you prefer this, then check out the new Settings->Structure tab.

Now, let’s inspect the different organization options:

With date grouping you can for instance organize your files by year, month and day and any combination thereof. You can even specify your own date patterns to customize the folder tree. An example continously shows what end result you can expect and presets are available for common choices.

When grouping by place, jAlbum uses GPS coordinates embedded in many of today’s digital images to map images to a place, region and country. Thank you geonames.org for providing such an excellent geolocation service!

The alphabetical grouping, uses the initial character of file names to group images into folders. This is handy for collectors who have their objects (insects, flowers etc) properly named, but wish to ease locating them alphabetically.

You also have a convenient way to wrap selected images into a folder, which will be a time saver when going through and organizing image sets manually. Just select a group of images, hit CTRL+ALT+W, name the new folder and done. The selected images are now moved inside the recently created folder.

There is also a handy Flatten operation that moves images out of their sub folders and places them in the current folder.

During these operations, jAlbum will handle file naming collisions and removal of duplicate files. If the result wasn’t what you wanted, you can undo these operations as jAlbum 13 now features multi level undo/redo.

I now naturally have my images perfectly organized by date and month on our network drive thanks to jAlbum 13. I hope you find it useful too!

/David Ekholm

Bo Brandsborg - Travel photographer Bo Brandsborg loves travel and photography – and has created hundreds of truly amazing photo albums telling the story from many different places around the world.

- You take amazing photos. What got you into photography?
Thank you very much. I got bit by the travel bug in the mid 90'es - so I bought my first camera shortly after.  I quickly realised that the camera made me see and remember many more places, people and sights on my trips. When you are always on the hunt for a picture you pay so much more attention to your surroundings. For me it was the perfect combo. Then it just took off! I couldn't - and still cant - go anywhere without my camera.

- Tell us a little about your nonprofit
As I take a lot of pictures of people, it seemed so much easier for me to specify on my website that I'm working on a non-profit basis, which I really am. Photography is still just a hobby for me.  However - if the future brings any changes on this subject I would have to reconsider.

- You’ve traveled to lots of interesting places - Is there any place you remember in particular?
I travelled to Kashmir in 2012, I think it was. The Kashmir Valley is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Even if Kashmir is subject to a boundary dispute between Pakistan and India - and Indian military is visible on every street corner - it once again showed me that the World is out there - and that travelling is not nearly as dangerous and impossible as one might think. Kashmir was FANTASTIC!
Other all time favorites are: The Greek Islands, Malaysia, Namibia and South America.

Kashmir, Dal Lake:
http://brandsborg.com/India%20-%20Kashmir%20-%20Dal%20Lake/index.html

Kashmir, Srinagar:
http://brandsborg.com/INDIA%20-%20Kashmir%20-%20Srinagar/index.html

Namibia, Sossusvlei:
http://www.brandsborg.com/NAMIBIA%20-%20Namib%20Desert%20-%20Sossusvlei/

South America, Ecuador, Quito:
http://brandsborg.com/Jalbum/ECUADOR%20-%20Quito%20-%20Feb%202010/index.html

Malaysia, Georgetown/Langkawi:
http://brandsborg.com/MALAYSIA%20-%20Penang%20and%20Langkawi%20-%20BW's/index.html

GREECE, Kastellorizo Island:
http://www.brandsborg.com/GREECE%20-%20Kastellorizo%20-%20May%202014/


- We’re naturally very happy that you’re using jAlbum. What made you choose our software for your photography workflow?
I am not a software/camera expert, so I knew that I needed to find a user friendly and easy solution. I googled and found jAlbum almost immediately. I have now been using jAlbum - and ONLY jAlbum for many years and I love the program! Gallery design is important for me, so I try to find skins that look really good......and there's a lot to choose from on jAlbum. So I'm still very happy with my jAlbums :)

Many thanks Bo and we're naturally looking forward to new amazing travel albums!

Check out Bo's website with hundreds of travel photo albums.

Bo Brandsborg
http://brandsborg.com

Haven't we all been there, buying the new cool camera, mobile phone or graphics card just to realize it's not the latest and greatest a month thereafter?

It's naturally inevitable that technology moves forward, but the feeling of just missing a new release is annoying. The same holds for software licenses. At jAlbum, we're now at version 12.5. People suspecting that we may release v13 tomorrow could hesitate to purchase a license today.

We've now made a change to resolve this problem. You're no longer buying a license for "version xyz" of jAlbum. The license instead includes a 12 months support and update plan. This means that you're guaranteed priority support and free updates, big or small within 12 months. After that you can still continue using the version you have at that time (the license doesn't expire), but to enjoy future updates and priority support you can extend your support and update plan another 12 months to a discounted price. It's as simple as that. So, what are you waiting for, get a license for jAlbum today!

If you already bought a v12 license you shouldn't need to regret that you didn't wait. When we release v13 we will be adding the 12 months support and update plan to the date you purchased your v12 license free of charge. Now isn't that fair?

We’d like to summarize some improvements made lately with the release of jAlbum 12.3 and 12.4. We hope you find that some of the things mentioned here justifies an update.

Just works better

In the recent months several improvements has been made to making jAlbum working as smoothly as possible, this includes minimizing RAM memory usage, robustness of file transfers and usability improvements as well as a number of bug fixes. Don’t suffer from problems that have been already been fixed (full list at release notes). Update your jAlbum today.

 
Get jAlbum 12.4

Better memory handling

jAlbum 12.4 has vastly reduced RAM memory usage. During an album build, earlier versions accumulated some metadata for the whole album, sometimes requiring several GB of RAM to process huge albums (>10.000 images). jAlbum 12.4 releases metadata on a per-folder basis thereby drastically reducing RAM memory requirement.

Test setup

These graphs illustrates RAM usage during a remake of a 50.000 image album (500 images per folder, Turtle skin). The max RAM used has been set to 400MB in order to provoke scarse memory conditions (normally set to 800MB).

   
jAlbum 12.3.5 memory profile

 

Memory usage peaking after only a couple of minutes. The processing thereafter slows down to come to an out-of-memory halt after processing 6000 of 50000 images.

jAlbum 12.4.0 memory profile

 

Linear memory usage over time. 50000 image album rebuilt in less than 6 minutes.

Help is here

The lack of proper online documentation was listed as the #1 cause of frustration by our users. With the introduction of jAlbum 12.3 we finally did something about that. jAlbum now has a well maintained wiki based online documentation at http://jalbum.net/help that documents every button, and best of all, you get access to the right help page by just clicking the blue “?” buttons in the corner of jAlbum’s windows or by hitting F1.

 

Turtle skin’s help system has been renewed too

Amongst many other skins Turtle’s help system got a facelift too. As a matter of fact it was rebuilt from ground. When you are on the skin’s settings page in jAlbum, clicking the blue help button will bring up the relevant Turtle help page. Besides giving explanation for each and every setting, the new page brings help collected by features too. You can also browse through all the sample albums easily.

Facebook importer

For the 12.3 release, we’ve added a handy Facebook importer to jAlbum. You can now easily import all or some of your Facebook images and albums along with titles and descriptions, just click the arrow of the Add button and select “From Facebook” from the menu!

 

 

+30

30 more trial days

If you haven’t evaluated jAlbum 12.3 or 12.4, now is the time. You get 30 trial days even if you’ve tried out earlier versions of jAlbum before. If you’re uncertain about upgrading, just install the current version aside of your existing version.

Download jAlbum

 

-50%

50% off for upgraders

We still offer those of you who upgrade from v11 to v12 a 50% discount on our licenses. Just ensure that you’re signed into jalbum.net when purchasing a new licence and the discount will be deducted automatically.

Upgrade now

 

Get in touch!

We appreciate knowing what you think of jAlbum, both the good and the bad. Please contact us via support@jalbum.net or via our user forum at http://jalbum.net/forum if there is anything you’d like to see changed, added or improved.

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