Combining existing albums to a master album

Maintaining large albums and combining existing ones into one can be a bit complicated. If you have a large number of albums already added to your site you might not want to rebuild the whole album again each time you add new albums. In this tutorial we'll show you how to handle the sub-albums individually and finally make a master album of all.

1. Prepare the folder for the site

Create a folder e.g. 'My Sites' under 'My Documents' and inside add the Folder for this site you plan to create, e.g. 'FamilyAlbum'.

2. Generate the sub-albums the regular way

• In JAlbum create a 'New Album', eg 20051017_London
  
• Set the output folder to the subfolder of FamilyAlbum (Setting / General). Use the exact same name as for Album name. (E.g. My Documents/My Sites/FamilyAlbum/20051017_London)
• Add your images by draging and droping or by clicking the green '+' button
  
• Add a meaningful name to the gallery by right-clicking the album name and choosing Properties
  
• Specify the link to the master album (Settings / Chameleon / General / Uplink). Choose "This", type its name in the "Name" box (e.g. 'Family Album') and leave the link as "../" 
  
• Sort images by 'Camera date' (Right-click + Sort + Camera date) or any other order if you want. You can also move the thumbnails around in a custom order
• Choose a folder thumbnail by right clicking the desired picture and choosing 'Use as folder thumbnail'
• Choose the skin and style for this album
  
• In Chameleon choose the 'Uplink from main page' as 'This' or 'Default' to make sure your uplink to the Master page works
• Generate the Gallery with the 'Make Album' button
• Save the Project (Ctrl + S)
• Do this with all the Albums you want to add

3. Create the Master album

• Create a new album called e.g. 'Family Album' (under 'My Albums' — this is the default)
• Add the previously created sub-albums by drag and dropping the folder names under 'My Albums' on the right pane. Not those you've created under 'My Site'!
• Turn off the 'Process subdirectories' option in Settings / Advanced / General tab. This way JAlbum will not process the ready made sub-albums.
• Hit the 'Make Album' button, and check the result with 'View album'

4. Adding new albums to Master album

When you want to add new albums, you have to repeat the steps in Section 2, add the new folder to the master project (see Section 3) and regenerate the master album. That's all.

See an example of a master album with sub albums

The full version of this tutorial can be found on Laza's site, author of the Chameleon skin. A big thank you to MarkE and Laza for writing this tutorial.