Starting today, we are pleased to announce that even guests are able to comment on your albums when you have the commenting widget enabled on an album.

This was the #1 requested widget improvement we received and we want to thank everyone in the community that suggested it!  Keep dreaming it and we'll keep building it!

 So what are you waiting for?  Enable the commenting widget on your albums and get feedback right away!

Wanna see it in action?  My friend Dor, the Jalbum mascot, would love a comment on his food album below.

Don't like the feedback you are getting?  The album owner can always sign in and delete comments from guests and non guests alike!

Album by Dor

User jboal shows how well Jalbum can be used to tell a story. In his album Inauguration he illustrates how he experienced the presidential inauguration day, the 20th of January. Each photo has a narrative description (caption) which makes it interesting to follow. He takes us with him as he walks to the Capital Building at 5 AM in the morning, the moment when Barack Obama is sworn in as president, until the celebration ceremonies in the afternoon. Thanks for sharing your story John!

Do you have a story to tell? Make sure to include captions to your photos making it easier for visitors to follow your story line. Adding captions is easily done in Jalbum software, simply double-click a thumbnail to enter edit mode and add captions below the pictures.

We are very happy to see all the kind words being written about Jalbum in different blogs, newspapers and software sites. Here are a few of the recently found articles:

Easily create a professional web photo album with Jalbum

"Have you ever wished that you can create a beautiful online photo album and share it with your friends? Jalbum - a web photo album generator that allows you to do just that.

Jalbum is a free Web photo album generator that is incredibly versatile and flexible. Not only is it extremely easy to use, it also comes with plenty of features that can turn you into a professional, without you even knowing it." Read more...

Creating a Web album

"Most of us come to the Internet as browsers - searching, browsing, buying and so on. Eventually, some of us are inspired to become a bit creative and decide to make our own website. For some, it may be a blog, sharing with the world our profound thoughts or it may be to share our hobby with the world. But for a lot of people, the motivation to publish their first site will be to share photos with distant family..." Read more

Share your images with style 

"Sharing images over the Internet has become a common practice nowadays, and everyone seems to have unleashed their artistic spirit. As a result, simple solutions that will make your pictures look amazing in a matter of minutes are highly regarded. This is where JAlbum comes in." Read more

A bit similar to the image sharing and hosting platform Flickr, Jalbum is another free online hosting service that allows users to create their own photo album gallery and share their digital images with friends and others. The whole setting up of your own personal web album is quite simple with Jalbum. It is only 3 steps away: download the Jalbum web album software, create your own album, and publish the album. Read more

Thanks for the spreading the word!

Our first third party Widget is called Name Tagger, and was created by Polar Rose. It helps
you quickly name all the people in your album with the help of Face Detection and Face
Recognition. Here is walkthrough of how this works:

After enabling the Polar Rose widget, it will start showing up in the widget bar at the
bottom of your album. That willl look something like this:

Click on Name Tagger.

You might see a message saying “Processing may take up to 1 hour”.

What this means is that Polar Rose has found your photos and has queued them for
processing. Most of the time this will be done in minutes! You should only see this message the first time you look at your album after enabling the Polar Rose widget. Once we processed your photos, and you come back to your album, the widget bar changes:

Clicking on this button starts the Name Tagger.

You will now be asked to either log in with an existing Polar Rose account, or create a new
one. Once you've signed in or created an account, the Name Tagger process starts.
Please remember that in order for the names you give to be stored, you need to walk
through the entire process. You can skip any step you want though.

The Name Tagger asks you for the name of the person displayed. Once you've entered the
name and clicked Proceed it will show you more photos of the same person and ask you
to conirm:

Face recognition is getting better all the time. It isn't perfect though, so if you get shown a
face of a person in here that isn't the same as the one you named earlier (now shown
above in the yellow bar), click on it to cross it out.

When you click proceed now, all photos that are not crossed out will get the same name.
The Name Tagger will then repeat this process for the next person for which it was able to
find multiple photos. Once it runs out of people with more than one photo, it will display the
remaining photos for you to group together by person.

Simply select all the faces you know to be of the same person and then click “Merge
selected” as indicated in the screenshot above. This then creates a stack with the number
showing how many photos it contains. You can select the stack and merge it with other
photos as well as other stacks if you want. Just remember that the objective is to create one of these stacks for each unique person!

If you need to change a stack, mouse over it to get an option to edit it. You can move on at
any time by clicking proceed.

Finally, you are asked to name each stack in turn. The Name Tagger might even suggest
names for the photos in a stack, if they look enough like the photos you already named
earlier in the process. Click proceed once more and:



Now when you come back to your album you'll see boxes around each face with the
names you gave displayed underneath:

Clicking on a face will show you more photos of that person on the Polar Rose web site:

Also, the widget bar now displays the Polar Rose dashboard:

It shows you a search box, three quick navigation buttons and the top 5 people in the
album. The buttons do the following:
1. “People” links to an overview of all people in your album on the Polar Rose site, including the unnamed ones.
2. “Named” links to just the named people
3. “Unnamed” links back to the Name Tagger, which will then allow you to name any
people left unnamed.

That concludes the basic walkthrough. There are several other features in there, which
you'll find when using it. We hope you'll enjoy this widget!

This morning started out great as I stumbled upon an article in PC World about Jalbum:

 Create Gorgeous Galleries with Jalbum

I was very pleased to read the kind words from writer Ian Harac:

"Jalbum is an easy-to-use freebie which can take folders of images on your hard disk and turn them into a sophisticated, attractive, online gallery with just a few mouse clicks. If you sign up at the vendor's site, you even get 30 megabytes of space free, with an easy to remember URL (yourname.jalbum.net). Pretty cool."

 Thanks for the write-up Ian!

 Update: digg this story!

I passed by Jalbum user dragkhar's board the other day and found that he's cooking up a fun happening:

I'm about to organize a joint theme happening and wondered if any of you might be insterested. What I have in mind is to come up with a theme for an album, we have a start and a finish date, all pics have to be taken between those dates and presented here on jalbum as an album. Then we can compare how we all interpret the theme differently and learn alot from eachoter. If you like the idea please feel free to forward it to all your friends and have them reply to me.
Was thinking to have a start date at 1st of Feb.

Thank you for you time
Best regards
Magnus Gustafsson
www.drakfoto.se

Sounds like a fun learning event, anyone else up for it? Why don't you head over to dragkhar's board and join in the conversation. Have fun with the theme pics!

There are a lot of talented artists who display their paintings with Jalbum albums. Here are a few of these galleries:

 Jalbum by rossabbott

Jalbum by deMim

Jalbum by genev

Jalbum by risuvan-sviat

Did you know that you can add widgets to a Jalbum even if you host your albums on your own website?  You still need to create a free Jalbum account in order to add and administrate widgets, but where you publish the album is entirely up to you!

Every time you sign in to the Jalbum software (version 8.1 and later) your albums will be created with widgets enabled no matter where they are published.  To add widgets, just sign in to Jalbum.net and you will see a "manage widgets" button next to your published albums (even when they are published on your own site) and select the widgets you want to enable.  It's a great way to get feedback on your albums.

Still need more help?  Try this tutorial.

Need some inspiration? Take a look at this Jalbum with widgets hosted on http://www.dcjephotography.net

 Jalbum by Dcjevans