Create your first jAlbum with the desktop app

Ready to create your first album? Doing so with the jAlbum desktop application is easy, lets you publish to any site and gives you full control over the look and feel of your albums! We'll show you how.

For the free version of jAlbum you can skip steps 1and 3.

Note: In the free version you can only change skin and its style settings.

1. Sign up

SignUp.jpg

If you haven't already done so, sign up for a 30 days free jAlbum trial account: http://jalbum.net/signup

If you don't have an account you can still use jAlbum, but you will need your own hosting in order to publish an album. Also, you are missing out on a bunch of neat stuff such as Widgets. You can read more about publishing to you own site in the Publish to your own site tutorial


2. Start the jAlbum application

frog.jpg

Download jAlbum: http://jalbum.net/software/download

After downloading and installing the jAlbum application, you should find an icon with our frog mascot Dor in your application/programs folder or on your desktop. Double click it to launch jAlbum.


3. Sign in

SignIn.jpg

Next, simply sign in with the same username and password you entered when you signed up on jalbum.net. If you are not hosting your albums with jAlbum and don’t want them to appear on your jAlbum profile/albums page then you don’t need to sign in.


4. Add photos, videos PDFs etc.

Use the add-button to add images or drag and drop images from your computer to the big white area in the jAlbum application.

Add.jpg
Adding images to a new album


You can also drag and drop folders to jAlbum. jAlbum will ask if you want to copy or link the images, the default is copy. Please read more about this here. Then jAlbum will ask for an album name and a description, the album/project name is the same as the name of the folder used or created, depending on how images are added. Tell the story of your album and click OK.

AddedFiles.jpg
How it looks when the images and folders are added


There are certain characters that should not be used for file and folder names, see Illegal characters and Naming of files and folders.

If you save the project using ‘Save as…’ and choose a name other than ‘jalbum-settings‘ then the project name shown in the recent projects pane will be the name of the settings file, not the folder name.


FacebookImporterAdd.png

You can also import images from Facebook by using the Facebook importer. On the add button there is a small arrow, if you click on that arrow the Facebook importer will be available. See image to the right. You can import complete albums or just a few images and you can choose to add your Facebook albums as sub folders in jAlbum.


5. Choose a skin

Skins are templates that add graphics and functionality to your album. Select a skin for your album in the skin select box. Most skins come in different graphical flavours called styles. Pick a style in the style select box, to create the look you want. You can read more about skins in the skin usage tutorial. Many skins have their own manuals, some are listed here.

SelectSkin.jpg
Select skin and style and see the example of how it will look


6. Prepare your jAlbum for the web - Make album

Push the Make album button and the jAlbum app will scale your images for the web (without touching your orginals) and make your album.

MakeAlbum.jpg
Making the album


The album is now saved on your computer and ready to upload! If you're not satisfied with the result, just make some changes!

FinnishedAlbum.jpg
Preview of the finished album


Now it's time to publish to your jalbum.net account!

Or publish to your own site!

Getting Help

jAlbum has context sensitive help, should you need it press the 'F1' key, click on the '?' Icon or use Menu//Help. You can also read the help files by going to http://jalbum.net/help/en/Help which has tutorials, FAQs, developer documentation and a link to the application manual