Permlink Replies: 23 - Pages: 2 [ 1 2 | Next ] - Last Post: 6 Nov 20, 00:13 Last Post By: razzle
AnCa

Posts: 399
Registered: 25-Mar-2005
Online jAlbum Fixed and Updated
Posted: 4 Oct 19, 18:21
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Finally we've (I've) replaced the old Flash based uploader for online jAlbum with a drag-and-drop enabled JavaScript uploader. Please abuse it and report any issues!

If the image is larger than 2048x2048 pixels it downscales the image in the browser before uploading it, so even large images should be uploaded quickly.

Next step is to update the jAlbum engine from v13.2.1 to 18.4 and remove the old Flash based skins and the least used HTML-skins and add Tiger as the new default.

I'll also fix the Pixlr integration (image edit function) since it's currently broken in most browsers.

Edited by: jGromit on 15-Oct-2019 16:56 - new title
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 4 Oct 19, 20:44   in response to: AnCa in response to: AnCa
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The uploader seems solid. :)

But yes, the image editor is unusable. Worse, it leaves you in no-man's-land, with escape being difficult.

Looking at the skins, I'd say that there's not a single one of them that should remain. Besides the Flash relics, the rest are all non-responsive blasts from the past. I suspect a lot of users land on Galleria if they're not using Turtle, but that one is pretty creaky these days.

And please kill Matrix - seeing that one pains me. Not only legacy, but a very early version, to boot.

So what skins should be offered? Tiger as the default, obviously, and Minimal for those who want a simple, stripped-down presentation.

I'm tempted to say Photoblogger, but that's one of those skins that needs access to the settings to use it to best advantage. But maybe we can arrive at some default settings that work well - probably excluding a lot of the "extra" features in the skin.

When Lucid gets its early kinks worked out, that would also be a good choice. When you're not using folders, it's pretty straightforward.

For reasons we've discussed on many occasions, third-party skins should probably be left out of the mix.
AnCa

Posts: 399
Registered: 25-Mar-2005
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 4 Oct 19, 20:59   in response to: JeffTucker in response to: JeffTucker
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jGromit wrote:
The uploader seems solid. :)
Great! :)

I've disabled the editor now. I thought it would be an easy fix to make it work (even though it would still require Flash), but that didn't work either. I think Pixlr no longer makes any effort in making their Flash editor work. Pixlr got a non-flash editor, but no documentation on how to integrate it into another site...

You're right about the skins used. Of the albums modified this year using the online creator, 71% used Turtle and 12% Galleria, and the remaining 17% were divided fairly equal among the rest of the skins.

So maybe Tiger, Galleria, Minimal and Lucid...?
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 4 Oct 19, 22:55   in response to: AnCa in response to: AnCa
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I'll come back to this later, but I just took a quick look at Photoblogger, and when you're not doing folders, the default settings are probably fine. You get an album that's fully responsive, and has a look and feel that's unlike the others in the list. I'd shut off a few more of the options, like searching and social media (I'm actually not seeing the share buttons for social media, even though it's turned on by default - not sure what's happening there).

ETA: Yes, turn off the search (in a no-folders album with limited metadata, there's not much point to it) and turn off the social media buttons. Otherwise, things are OK for online jAlbum use.

I don't see any problem with using all of the styles of Tiger and Photoblogger - that gives the online jAlbum users a chance to introduce some variety, so that each "class trip to the whatever" doesn't look exactly like all the others. ;)
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 5 Oct 19, 13:54   in response to: JeffTucker in response to: JeffTucker
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Just one little oddity - it may have been there in online jAlbum, and I just never noticed it. When I add a bunch of images, whether with a file chooser or by clicking and dragging, they display in reverse name order (I'm not sure it's consistently in reverse name order). When you make the album, they're sometimes in the expected order, but at other times in a seemingly random order. The display of the photos in online jAlbum doesn't match the album unless you refresh the page.

All-in-all, it's kind of unpredictable. I think the default should probably be to sort them in name order, at least until the user starts clicking and dragging stuff.
AnCa

Posts: 399
Registered: 25-Mar-2005
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 12 Oct 19, 03:18   in response to: JeffTucker in response to: JeffTucker
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I have now removed all Flash skins and the least popular ones, so I'm for now keeping Galleria, Compact and Expo. And I have added Lucid and Tiger. Turtle is still the default skin, but as soon as I see that Tiger works as expected I will replace Turtle with Tiger. (Sharing is one thing I might disable. Not sure if it actually works, and you can't do it while you're still in the editor.)

And PhotoBlogger and Minimal could be added too.

And yes, sorting is a bit weird. I haven't touched that part. New photos are probably added to the end, but if you add multiple photos you can't probably tell the order within those photos. But I'll look into that.
davidekholm

Posts: 3,442
Registered: 18-Oct-2002
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 12 Oct 19, 12:24   in response to: AnCa in response to: AnCa
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Wohoo! Great work Anders!
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 12 Oct 19, 15:24   in response to: davidekholm in response to: davidekholm
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Attachment online.png (62.4 KB)
Looking good. I'll probably never love online jAlbum, but at least it's no longer the embarrassment it had become. :)

One little fix on the "make an album" page, screenshot attached. I'd suggest something non-committal, to avoid future maintenance, like Choice of themes (skins).

Now the question is whether it can all be kept updated, going forward.
AnCa

Posts: 399
Registered: 25-Mar-2005
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 15 Oct 19, 22:30   in response to: JeffTucker in response to: JeffTucker
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jGromit wrote:
I'll probably never love online jAlbum
:) Just give it 15 more years...

One little fix on the "make an album" page, screenshot attached. I'd suggest something non-committal, to avoid future maintenance, like Choice of themes (skins).
Good. Now changed to "Small selection of skins".

I have also made Tiger the default skin. Turtle is still around, but last in the list. It will eventually be removed, but most new albums will probably be made with some of the other skins.

Now the question is whether it can all be kept updated, going forward.
Yes, I think my mental barrier of updating the skins in online jAlbum has been lowered, so keeping them updated should be easier. But since they use just a small selection of features in most skins, updating them regularly isn't that important. So it's more important to keep the list updated than the individual skins.
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 15 Oct 19, 22:40   in response to: AnCa in response to: AnCa
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AnCa wrote:
But since they use just a small selection of features in most skins, updating them regularly isn't that important.

True. It's rare for a skin update to rip the guts out of the basic page coding. Skin updates usually involve new options or fixes to some of the more obscure existing options, none of which affects online jAlbum.
razzle

Posts: 13
Registered: 1-Nov-2007
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 4 Dec 19, 07:18   in response to: JeffTucker in response to: JeffTucker
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For what it is worth I came across this discussion recently before going on an overseas holiday. Previously I used Facebook to post holiday photos for my relatives to look at. This was a bit of a pain because some rellies aren't on Facebook. Anyway I decided to give the online jAlbum a go and I was pretty happy with the results. I used my Samsung Galaxy S8 to take the photos and upload them to a jAlbum online album using the default Tiger skin. I successfully added captions to the photos.

The only major problem was the aforementioned issue of the photos not being sorted as per the date/time. It would be near perfect if the photos sorted correctly. I couldn't work out a way to re-sort them. The Tiger theme image also didn't work too well but that wasn't a major issue.

I put 183 images in one album without any issues. It was just a matter of emailing the link to the relatives and they could see where we were up to. A quick and dirty way of letting the kids and grandchildren know what we were up to.

Thanks for updating this process. It worked pretty well.

http://razzle.jalbum.net/Japan-and-Singapore-Trip-2019/

Regards,

Bob
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 4 Dec 19, 13:15   in response to: razzle in response to: razzle
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razzle wrote:
The only major problem was the aforementioned issue of the photos not being sorted as per the date/time. It would be near perfect if the photos sorted correctly. I couldn't work out a way to re-sort them.

You should be able to click and drag the thumbnails into a new sequence. But yes, having a couple of standard sorting options, like by camera date or file name, would be a big plus!

The Tiger theme image also didn't work too well but that wasn't a major issue.

That's a tricky one. It would probably take some development work to let you choose an image other than the first one as the theme image, and adding a proper cropping mask would be even tougher.

Good to know that it's working at least reasonably well in the real world.
razzle

Posts: 13
Registered: 1-Nov-2007
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 5 Nov 20, 23:17   in response to: JeffTucker in response to: JeffTucker
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Hi,

Used the online jAlbum again on a recent holiday. Nothing has changed with the process in the last 12 months. Just wondering if there is any easy way for me to extract the photo comments from the online album so I can use them when redoing the album in the jAlbum software? Just trying to save some typing.

http://razzle.jalbum.net/QLD-Road-Trip-2020/

Cheers,

Bob
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 5 Nov 20, 23:20   in response to: razzle in response to: razzle
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In the desktop application, you should be able to choose File > Import > Import Published Album.

Haven't tried it in a while - I will, and if it fails, I'll be back to post about it.
JeffTucker

Posts: 8,039
Registered: 31-Jan-2006
Re: Flash uploader replaced with JavaScript for online jAlbum
Posted: 5 Nov 20, 23:28   in response to: JeffTucker in response to: JeffTucker
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Failed miserably. Probably a mismatch between the version of Tiger that's part of online jAlbum and the newer desktop version. Something that Anders and Laza need to look into. I get an "illegal value" exception:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: illegal value
	at java.desktop/javax.swing.SpinnerNumberModel.setValue(Unknown Source)
	at java.desktop/javax.swing.JSpinner.setValue(Unknown Source)
	at se.datadosen.util.PropertyBinder$1.setValue(PropertyBinder.java:60)
	at se.datadosen.util.PropertyBinder.doSyncUI(PropertyBinder.java:241)
	at se.datadosen.util.PropertyBinder.syncUI(PropertyBinder.java:195)
	at se.datadosen.jalbum.JAlbumFrame.engine2UI(JAlbumFrame.java:2125)
	at se.datadosen.jalbum.JAlbumFrame.engine2UI(JAlbumFrame.java:2099)
	at se.datadosen.jalbum.JAlbumFrame.doLoadProject(JAlbumFrame.java:1851)
	at se.datadosen.jalbum.JAlbumFrame.loadProject(JAlbumFrame.java:1784)
	at se.datadosen.jalbum.JPublishWizard$PublishStep$6.lambda$actionPerformed$0(JPublishWizard.java:1113)
	at se.datadosen.jalbum.JPublishWizard$PublishStep$24.run(JPublishWizard.java:2299)
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