With the new Fotomoto shopping cart integration you can sell your photos as prints, cards or offered for download in a fully customizable, stylish way. While there are lots of stock photo sites and printing services around, none of them offers as many choices for the customers, and as many controls for the seller like Fotomoto. Visitors can share your images over eCards, or through facebook and other community sites to support quick spreading.

1. Sign up with Fotomoto

The first step naturally is signing up with Fotomoto. That's free.

2. Specify the selling options

With Fotomoto you can fine-tune every little detail to your taste: the prices, the profit, the sizes and formats allowed, and paper quality - you can even define discounts. By default Fotomoto adds a 50% profit on prints for you, and deducts 15% from downloads. But you can change the profit rate on prints to 25% (affordable), 50% (moderate) or 100% (high end), depending on how you feel your added value should be represented in the rpice. Check out the Quick Pricing button.

3. Create the album

Now Make the album in jAlbum using your Store ID (see your fotomoto.com settings page) – insert the code on the Settings / Turtle / Selling photos / Seller ID box. Obviously you need to tick the Use Fotomoto box too.

In the album don't include the originals, because jAlbum puts them in a folder visible to the public. In order to stop visitors from downloading the images from the album make sure to turn on Right click protection on Turtle's Advanced page, and you can also apply a watermark (on the same page). This will not affect the final prints.

Make the album. Preview and modify the settings to your taste.

When you are satisfied with the album Upload it to your site or jalbum.net in order to be able to test with Fotomoto. If you are uploading to your own site you will need to click on the little triangle on the Upload button, and choose: Upload / Manage. Now you can define a new connection. When you are loggen in create a new folder for the album with the "new folder" icon. Never upload albums to the site root unless you are creating the whole site in jAlbum.

4. Upload the originals

In order Fotomoto can fulfil the orders it will need to get access to your high resolution photos. Go to your album's Input folder (Tools / Open directories / Input directory), and upload the original images to either your album's root / originals folder or to a shared folder in your site root, e.g. /hires. The latter has the advantage that you don't need to notify Fotomoto of each new album, but you will need to make sure there are no duplicate file names in all the albums. Use any FTP or sFTP client or you can even use jAlbum's built-in FTP client. I will show you how.

1. Click on the little triangle on Upload and choose Upload / Manage.
2. Click Connect
3. Once connected go to your album's folder and add a new folder for the originals with the "new folder" icon.
4. Now drag and drop the original images from the Input folder onto the new folder.

4. Password protect the originals folder

Now your files are ready to share with Fotomoto, but first you might want to make the folder password-protected. You will need to access your site's control panel:

Choose Password Procect Directories, and navigate to the "originals" folder you've created in the previous step. Use the folder icons on the left to change directories, and click the folder name once you are there. That will bring up a window to add permissions to the folder, something like this:

Tick the Password protect this directory box, and create a new user. Make sure you've provided a strong password. Click Add/modify authorized user. (Copy the password for later use.)

5. Tell Fotomoto where to look for the originals

In order Fotomoto can pick up your originals you will need to give the login credentials on fotomoto.com. It can be managed on the Fotomoto Settings / Auto pickup page.

1. Create New Profile
2. Fill in Profile Name (anything), Storage type (HTTP), User name (same as above) and Password (paste from above), Host (yoursite.com/) and Path (the path to the originals from the site root, e.g. albums/albumname/originals
3. Click Test Connection to make sure Fotomoto can reach the folder
4. In the Filename Lookup Pattern use simply FILENAME.EXT, as jAlbum is using the same names in albums as the original files were named.

Now you are ready to cash in some money. Just make some noise to make your album noticed.

Here is my final album (click to test):

(Please note, altough I tried to collect my better shots, these are not professional-quality photographs, but otherwise you can buy them if you like. :) )

I hope you'll find this a great addition to jAlbum / Turtle. Please note, to use this tool you don't need to have a license (or storage), so you can give it a try straight off.

/Laza

jAlbum 10.7 comes with a new plugin - a histogram. A histogram can assist you a lot with improving your images. Here’s first a short introduction to reading histograms.

General

A histogram is a graphical representation of the tonal distribution of colors in a digital image. In general, our images have an RGB-Color mode where R stands for red, G for green and B for blue. All three of them can take a value between 0 and 255. There are different modes of histogram that can show you e.g. only the red distribution.

The horizontal axis represents the different tonal values from 0 to 255, while the vertical axis represents the number of pixels in that particular tone value. The left side of the horizontal axis represents the black and dark areas, the middle represents medium grey and the right side represents light and pure white areas.

Image improvements with histograms

A histogram can be used to improve your images because there are some general rules describing how correctly exposed images should look in a histogram. Thus, improvements in picture brightness and contrast can be obtained.

The histogram for a very dark image will have the majority of its data points on the left side of the graph. It’s underexposed.

Conversely, the histogram for a very bright image will have most of its data points on the right side of the graph. It’s overexposed. 

If the graph is cut on the left or the right border, the image is highly underexposed or overexposed. In this case image details has been lost to blown-out highlights or blacked-out shadows that can’t be reconstructed. 

The graph of a histogram of a correctly exposed image should be predominantly in the center of the histogram. Nevertheless, there could be images that are correctly exposed but the histogram looks different. In night pictures for example, it shouldn’t be very bright. So you don't have the "right" histogram.

Furthermore, a histogram shows you if the image has a good contrast. A good contrast means that you have colors with nearly every value between 0 and 255, so a large spectrum. Low contrast images have a narrow spectrum:

 Source: desert picture:  http://www.jroller.com/gfx/entry/new_blendings_modes_for_java2d

Using the histogram in jAlbum

The histogram is located in the lower right corner of jAlbum's Edit panel. (Double click an image to enter edit mode.) As you play along with jAlbum's image tools like "Levels" and "Gamma" you will see how the histogram updates in real time to your changes. If you wish to keep the histogram visible at all times, just undock it to a separate window.

Features of the plugin

Just above the histogram you find the view mode selector. The different modes are:

• Luminance: Show the type of brightness distribution. The absolute brightness is however not very meaningful, because  human eyes don't detect brightness linearly with color. Basically, we see green as brighter than blue. Thus, the term Luminance was invented, which is brightness adjusted to indicate appropriately what we really see. Luminance value =  0.3 R + 0.59 G + 0.11 B
• Red/Green/Blue: Show the distribution of the particular color
• RGB-Overlay: Show red, green and blue distributions in one histogram
• RGB: Every bar represents an addition of R, G, B of that particular value.

The histogram can be undocked to a separate window in two ways:

1. Click and drag the window to your preferred position
2. Right-Click and choose undock in the menu to have the histogram automatically positioned next to jAlbum's main window.

Finally, you have a setting area where you can change some default settings to your preferred behavior.

General settings:

• You can choose which view mode you want when you start editing an image.
• You can decide if the histogram should be undocked when starting jAlbum.
• You can decide if you want jAlbum to remember the position of the window of the histogram or if it should always use the default position.

In addition, you can choose your preferred visual style:

• Photoshop vs. iPhoto: This setting only affects the RGB-Overlay-Mode (how the three channels are overlaid). The iPhoto style uses different transparencies, while the Photoshop style adds overlaid colors so that you could see on the basis of colors the Overlay.
  

• White vs. Black: You can choose if you prefer white or black bars for luminance and RGB.

 About the author

 I'm a student from Berlin and I'm currently doing an internship at jAlbum. The histogram is the first plugin that I wrote. I'm looking forward to getting feedback from you. So what do you think? 

You might've missed, but Turtle skin can be used to sell your photos or products too. To use this option you need to hold a Pro license or a Power storage account with jAlbum. Although the payment is routed through Paypal or Google Checkout, your customers don't need to be signed up with these payment processors, they can simply use their credit card as well. Here are the steps to create an album with shopping cart, and what the visitors see during the shopping process.

Creating the album

First collect the photos (of the products) you want to sell, and create a new album in the jAlbum application.

• Add the photos by the Add button or by dragging them onto jAlbum
• Choose Turtle skin
• Add an image to be used as "Theme image" on the index page. Right-click → Use as folder thumbnail, and Right-click → Exclude
• Switch to Edit mode (Pencil icon) and add captions to your items with the details of the product (you can use HTML code too in the captions)

Setting up the shopping cart

In order to use either Paypal or Google Checkout as payment gateway you need to be signed up with them. Here are the links to sign up with Paypal or Google Checkout. With Google Checkout you can usually use your Google Account if exists. For receiving more then just one or two payments a year you need to have a Merchant Account. Please read the provider's documentation first about the conditions.

• Make sure you are signed in with jAlbum. If you are not, there will be a button on left top of the window with "Sign in". If you've singed in after you've opened the album you might need to re-open the album by clicking the "Empty project" and back to the actual again.
• Go to Settings window, and switch to Selling photos
• Check the Add a smart shopping cart to your photos
• Choose your preferred payment processor: Paypal or Google Checkout
• Add your Seller ID: the email you are using with paypal or the long Merchant ID string.
• Specify the currency you want to receive payments in. You can use only one currency in a shopping cart!
• Add Overall handling if applies. This is an amount will be added only once on top of each finished shopping cart. E.g. a flat package and posting fee.
• Add your default Shop options in the following syntax: Shop option name=Price, e.g. 10x15" Print=1.00. Please note, you must not use the currency sign here!
• If you want to add a shipping fee on top of each item you can use the following syntax: Shop option name=Price+Shipping, e.g. A1 poster=50+10 - this means the price for the poster is $50, and will be added $10 on top of each as shipping cost.
• You can add as many options as you wish – each in a new line –, and naturally you can combine the ones with and without shipping fee

Setting up individual shopping options for the pictures

If your items have different prices or you want different options attached to them, no problem, you can specify individual shop options in Edit mode. Click the Pencil icon on the top right, and open the Image data tab near the bottom right. There you can specify the shop option you want for the actual picture only. The syntax is the same as with the global options, see above. If you want to use the default option just leave this box empty. If you don't want the shopping cart added to a specific picture just add a minus sign here.

Final touches

Before you release the album to the public you might want to tweak the album here or there. Here are some of my suggestions for albums made for selling.

• Set the shopping cart as visible by default: Settings / Turtle / General / Info panel visible by default and Selling photos
• Add Terms and Conditions as Album info Settings / Turtle / Header / Album info window or as a separate page.
• You also might want to add social plugins to your shop on the Settings / Turtle / Sharing page

Now it's time to see what we've done. Hit Make and when that's finished hit Preview or press F12. You can now check if the shopping works, but do not go to checkout unless you have a sandbox account with Paypal.

The shopping process

• Your visitor will see the shopping cart by default
• He / she can choose the shop option and specify the quantity. The total amount will be displayed next to it.
• The Add to cart button places the item in the shopping cart and a popup window will come up with the items already placed in the cart
• The View Cart button is there to check the shopping cart content without placing a new item in it
• See below how Paypal's shopping cart looks like. You can remove items, change quantities here, and when you are ready you can go to check out and pay either from a Paypal account or by a Credit card. See right.
• When the payment has completed you will receive a notification in email with the list of sold products each with folder and file name, the shop option chosen and the quantity

Now it's your turn to fulfil the order

Failing to do so will result in a "dispute" opened by the customer, and if there's no agreement within 3 weeks, Paypal will get back the money from the seller, and devalue its "reputation", which easily lead to a locked seller account, with locked money too.

Conlusion

Opening a shop with the help of Turtle skin is that easy. Fits perfect for web-shops selling just a few items and don't need advanced commercial features, like discounts or database-driven stock handling.

See the final album here.

/Laza

Originally posted on Lazaworx.com

We just released jAlbum 10.4. It should perhaps have been labeled jAlbum 11 cause it's packed with improvements and important bug fixes, but most of the changes go under the hood, so we decided to stay at 10.4. There is actually only one change you can notice in the user interface (hint: right click an empty area of an album project), but it opens the door to a whole world of possibilities:

jAlbum is now not only a tool for making awesome web albums. It's a site maker too :-).

The inspiration

I was passed a link to a website that has a particularly good album integration:

www.tedlansingphotography.com

What you see is a typical photographer's web site, where the images are in focus but there are also links to about, contact and blog pages.

jAlbum is now generic enough to support the making of these types of simple portfolio sites (all but the blog).  Here is a sample site. This is made possible by allowing users to mix .htt pages (html template pages) along with images in their album projects. The .htt files will get processed just like the template pages of skins, but they can contain any html, not just album specific html.

Here are the advantages:

• A user can easily create a custom landing page as an introduction to his album by putting a custom "index.htt" file in the root image folder. With that one present, jAlbum will ignore the skin's "index.htt" file for that folder (that produces the thumbnail overview). This behavior mirrors how web servers treat the existence vs lack of an index.html file in a folder.

• A user wanting to create a site looking like the example above would simply create sub-albums for each sub-section plus three more .htt pages called About.htt, Contact.htt and Blog.htt (the last one simply containing an iframe towards a blog service). To have consistent navigation added to the top of all generated pages, each .htt page includes a standard "page-header.inc" and "page-footer.inc" page provided by the skin (and ultimately generic ones provided by jAlbum if the skin lacks these files)

• To simplify creating these custom "About.htt", "Contact.htt" and "Blog.htt" files, jAlbum has a new context menu called "New page" that grabs an "empty-page.htt" file from the system folder. The template for the empty-page.htt looks like this (double click to open):

Skin developers can easily modify their skins to support full web sites by including a top-level navigation bar that links to the extra .htt pages users create. They should also provide custom "page-header.inc" and "page-footer.inc" files so that any extra pages made by users get the same look and feel and navigation that the album pages have. jAlbum provides code for a simple navigation bar, so a minimal code for skin developers to add can be:

<ja:if test="<%= JAlbumUtilities.hasWebPages(rootFolder) %>">
    <ja:include page="navigation-bar.inc" />
</ja:if>

Sorry for the tech look of that. It's only meant for skin developers. That code first checks if the user has added custom web pages to the top level of the album, and if so adds a navigation bar.

So far, the following skins include site support: Turtle 3.0, Base 2.0, Galleria and Minimal. All are bundled with jAlbum 10.4.

Resource files

A web site is not just about web pages and album images. You also want to include other resources, like a custom logo, favicon, about-page image, css and such. Put those files inside a folder you name "res" (stands for "resources") of your "album project". That folder will automatically be hidden so it's not visually included in the "album" you make, but the whole folder is copied to the final "album" (should be called "site", right?), and all resources within can be referred to via the ${resPath} variable, no matter where in the folder hierarchy you are. 

Conclusion

So does a final site look? Here is a sample made using the Base skin. Notice the new "About" and "Contact" pages. The user didn't have to write one line of html to accomplish that.

You can download and unzip this sample album project if you wish to see how this sample site was made. Just drop the unzipped project folder onto jAlbum 10.4 or above to open it.

I'm excited about the potential this brings! We're not trying to make jAlbum compete with Dreamweaver, but why not make it easy to produce simple, but self contained portfolio sites? As jAlbum albums aren't that well suited for integration with server side CMS tools, making jAlbum produce the full site will so to speak fulfill the initial needs for many photographers wanting their own portfolio site.

The plan is that the next major jAlbum version shall contain a list of "site templates" that pre-populates an album project with all files needed for a full blown web site, but until we're there, this post will probably trigger your feedback and our skin community to tweak their skins to support the making of full web sites too.

Now I'd like to hear what you think!