We've seen a massive growth in the number of sign ups to our site since the launch of Jalbum Widgets and the latest usability changes made to Jalbum software. It's exciting to see people finding Jalbum from all corners of the world. To visually display the geographical spread of the Jalbum community, we've made an integration with Google maps. The map is now updated with new icons for the different events: skin download, software download and start of Jalbum software. Makes it more fun to watch.

The map shows the Jalbum activity of the past hour in real time. A frog head represents Jalbum software start, the yellow skin icon is a skin download, and the red arrow means a Jalbum download.

Welcome all new Jalbum users! Check out the Jalbum activity map

Allow for it to load a few seconds, there are a lot of frog heads to process :)

Today we launched a brand new set of improvements. On your profile page you will find a collection of users that has added one or more of your albums as a favorite. In a way they are your "Fans". Go on and pay their profile page a visit to find likeminded people and more favored albums that are similar to yours.

We have recently been working on improving the performance of the site and at the same time solving small usability issues that have a great impact. For example we have changed the function "Board" to "Guestbook". This is a more appropriate name for it. Also, we have improved the usability of the function itself. It is now much easier to follow conversations between you and your visitors.

Finally we wanted to raise the voice of the community and have added a preview of recent albums that is made favorite to someone. This is truly the latest and greatest of Jalbum. Enjoy the new features!

I just wanted to answer a question we get quite frequently right now. "Can I use widgets on my album even if it is not hosted on Jalbum?"

Answer: yes you can.

Widgets work on any album you create no matter where you put it. The only requirement is that you have to sign in when you use Jalbum software. The signing in part is necessary to verify your ownership of your album.

We see a great growth in the use of the commenting widget since we modified it to allow non-jalbum users to comment on albums. That is exciting! It has never been easier to see which photos people like to watch. We hope you are as thrilled as we are, so invite your friends and family and receive all the praise you deserve.

User dragkhar recently initiated a theme shoot on the subject Architecture. We're seeing a lot of albums on that theme being published from all corners of the world. It's interesting to see the different interpretations of the theme, have a look:

Album by: strangeste

Album by: alan927

Album by: gbenic

Album by: PaulineOliverPic

Album by: dragkhar

 Album by: jarekmatla

Album by discordia

Album by: carl

Album by: hrvojemihajlic

Album by: JMCPhotoWorks

Album by: Rickvangerven

Album by: wimage

Album by: KarleenGansberg

We get a lot of requests from bloggers who want to integrate their Jalbum albums into blogs. Jalbum is appreciated by bloggers as they can customize photo albums to fit the look and feel of the blog and also for being able to publish it to their own domain. We've already made it easy to share albums in blog posts. Now, we're excited to announce a new way to share photo albums in blogs: the Jalbum blog badge (beta). The blog badge displays your latest published albums in a nifty widget in the sidebar of your blog. This is what mine looks like:

  
(note: this is just a picture)

Jalbum blog badge comes in six different color schemes, to match your blog. You can also personalise the title. For a live example check out the badge in the right column further down in this blog. We're still testing it, that's why it's labeled as "beta" and you can't find a link to it from your user pages yet. To try it out, follow this link: http://jalbum.net/create-badge

 Enjoy!

Today we have released Jalbum 8.2. With each release we have two main goals:

• Simplify the workflow for newcomers
• Empower advanced users

At a glance, these dual goals might seem contradicting, but we firmly believe this is the balance we need to strike in order to satisfy the many existing users and at the same time attract users with less computing skills. The changes made to Jalbum 8.2 are in line with this philosophy.

Workflow improvements

We have made several simplifications to the work flow, from the welcome sign in panel to publishing your first album. We've introduced a collapsible user interface panel where we can hide more advanced settings and redesigned the main settings panel to better reflect the basic album settings most users would want to set.

Power to professionals

Camera enthusiasts and professionals will appreciate the improvements we've made to handling camera metadata. In Jalbum's Edit view, Jalbum now displays a "Camera" panel that extracts relevant camera EXIF information like F number, exposure time and focal length. Jalbum even calculates the 35mm focal length equivalent for you.

Power to developers

Skin developers, check out the improved "Skin developer" menu under the Tools menu! You will enjoy a powerful integrated text editor that does syntax coloring and is aware of the variables that can be used by a skin. It also has internal documentation for all Jalbum variables. Apart from improvements to this editor, we've added new functions to the "Skin developer" menu to create new skins and delete skins.

The new camera info panel and integrated text editor are two examples of Plugins using Jalbum's new Plugin API. This API allows developers to add new components to Jalbum's Tools menu, its context menu and edit panel. Skin developers may also use this API to add custom UIs to the edit panel. A custom edit panel may for instance contain fields not yet available in Jalbum's main UI, like fields for category and location for instance, or why not have UI controls for customizing the layout on an image-by-image basis? It will be exciting to see what the skin developer community comes up with! I will soon release a demo skin in the skin repository that shows how a skin can use this new API to produce a custom edit panel.

Jalbum's integrated text editor and camera info plugin have been released as open source under the liberal Apache license. You can access the source code in the links above. If you make improvements to these plugins or make new plugins, please post them in Jalbum's developer forum.

Enjoy!

Are you like us you probably have your computer stuffed with digital photos from holidays, vacation and family members. The oldest pictures are dated at least two years back, the time where you bought your new digital camera.  You might have backed them up during the years but you don’t want to remove them from the hard disk. “I’m planning to print the best shots anyway”.

But you seldom print them, do you?

To all of you that are suffering from this printophobia we have a simple solution to your problem. Look at your most recent photos. Find 40 photos you would like to print.  It doesn’t have to be the best shots in your collection. The first 40 photos you could find that would do well as a print is fine. Move them to a separate folder. Yes, move them. Don’t copy. Name the folder “Prints”.

Now, find a printing service and order the photos in your “Prints” folder. When you get the prints you will feel excited and encouraged to print more photos. Pick the next 40 good pictures and move them to a new folder or subfolder to “Prints” . This time you might want to try some color adjustment and polish the photos before you send them off to the printing service. Repeat this as long as you want.

This is basic task psychology. It’s the same with sports. No athlete starts off with running 50 miles. You start with a one or two mile run to get the feel for it.

At Jalbum we are exited about prints and we want to build printing support for your album images. We are planning for the smoothest and most user friendly way of doing this so have patience with us.
Please share your thoughts and experiences from printing services with us. It will help us pick printing partners in the future and will spawn a printing service worthy the Jalbum users.