Useful Freeware

Create you own web photo gallery with JAlbum

JAlbum is an awesome web album generator, that creates web albums from set of digital pictures. At first when I found out it is written in Java, I was skeptical about the speed it will generate the albums with. I was wrong! It is a very nice application with very reasonable speed. Here are the features I liked the most:

Support for Skins

Skins (a.k.a. themes) define the look and feel of your gallery. Extensive Skin Repository is available with skins from multiple authors. Of course you could make your own, but there are plenty to choose from. Several skins are installed “standard” with the program. There is support for skin-related options in the GUI, depending on the skin. My favorite skin BluPlusPlus has myriad of customization options.

Create Album from Folder Structure

It is very nice that JAlbum creates the album structure, based on the input folder structure. This way as your photos are arranged in folders and subfolders anyway it is very easy to create an album out of them. If you need folder thumbnails in the album, make sure to select a photo for a thumbnail in the JAlbum GUI. Also worth mentioning is that when you update an existing album, you could select to only process the files that are new, which considerably speeds up the generation process.

Familiar Explorer-like Interface

The user interface is arranged as Windows Explorer with a folder tree on the left and thumbnail view on the right side. Supports dragging and dropping files. You can easily organize a large number of images.

Image Manipulation

You can set it to extract metadata from the images (IPTC, EXIF, etc.) like camera, aperture, shutter speed, and others. Image filtes can be applied for watermarking, rotating, adding borders, etc.

The program actually supports any kind of file, not just images, so you can include along with the photos PDFs or Word Documents for example.

Web Publishing

JAlbum can directly upload the generated album to an ftp site or use the integrated web server. When uploading to an ftp site and you are updating your album, you can select “Smart Upload” and JAlbum will check which files are already on the server and will not re-upload them.

Here are several of screenshots.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 12:46 am and is filed under Graphics, Internet. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.