Jul 07, '03 09:39:00AM • Contributed by: robg

[Score: 9 out of 10]
- [Product Page]
- Price: Free (donations accepted)
I'll start with the negatives -- JAlbum is written in Java, which means it launches a bit slowly, and doesn't have 100% of the traditional Mac application appearance. However, that's about the only thing I can fault JAlbum on. In every other sense, this seems to be the perfect tool for my needs regarding web-based photo albums.
There are four tabs in the JAlbum interface - Main, Edit, Publish, and Advanced. In the Main tab, you control things such as the input and output folders, size of images and thumbnails, image order, and (coolest of all) the skin and style of your album. There are twelve included skins (the basic layout of the page), each of which could have two or more styles (CSS files that determine the look of the chosen skin). The real power of JAlbum, though, is that both the skins and the attached CSS files are completely customizable. JAlbum uses ".htt" files (HTML templates) that allow you to completely control the layout of your album, and you can then customize the associated CSS file to your heart's content. I started by duplicating an existing appearance folder and then applied my customizations to wind up with exactly the format I wanted.
On the Edit tab, you can apply comments to the photos, and do some basic manipulation (rotation, mirror, flip). The Publish tab allows you to specify an FTP server (the only supported transfer method), but I just used Transmit after creating the local pages. The Advanced tab provides some additional power tools, with the use of user-defined variables to do things like set the title of the album, and add headers and footers. You refer to the defined variables in the .htt files to place data on the pages.
There's a bit of a learning curve to JAlbum, given all that it can do. However, there's a great set of online help on the JAlbum homepage to help with the learning, and it's very easy to experiment with different layouts to find exactly the look you want. Between iBlog and JAlbum, I now have a simple set of tools that will make keeping our family site updated a much simpler proposition.
Note: There's no icon for JAlbum that I can find, so there's no icon posted with this story -- it runs with the default Java "Run Anywhere" installer icon.]
