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jAlbum 36 welcomes Chromium!
Chromium is the modern open-source browser component used by Google Chrome. It’s now the embedded browser engine of jAlbum 36. For decades jAlbum has been using an embedded browser engine for tasks like previews, HTML editing, and the Google Maps-based location editor. The engine, supplied by Oracle is based on a framework called “WebKit”. Unfortunately, […]
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Master Your Photography Workflow
A solid photography workflow is key to maximizing your time, maintaining consistency, and delivering high-quality results. By optimizing every step, from planning to final delivery, you can focus more on your creative work and grow your business effectively. Here’s how to master your photography workflow. 1. Plan and Prepare Before the Shoot Every great photoshoot […]
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How to Grow Your Photography Business
Standing out and growing a successful photography business takes more than just an eye for great shots. It requires strategic planning, a strong online presence, and leveraging the right tools to streamline your workflow and reach potential clients. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by utilizing platforms like jAlbum, which offers […]
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Our Android app is finally updated!
Our Android app that is used to view albums published to our community section and, if you use our storage, create and edit albums on the go has been with us since 2016. The app has’t been updated since then, so it has been quite neglected. With the release of Android 12 some things even […]
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How To Share Photos With Clients: A Beginner’s Guide
As a photographer, delivering photos to your clients is one of the most crucial steps in your workflow. How you present and share your work can have a lasting impact on your client’s experience and your professional reputation. Whether you’re showcasing your work through a website for photography portfolio or directly sharing individual collections, it’s […]
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Shopping Carts in jAlbum skins
jAlbum is great for sharing travel pics or showcasing your portfolio, but nowadays more and more people use it for business purposes. Beyond selling photos it can be used for selling products as well. There are a few ways of doing this, just read on. PayPal Shopping cart PayPal provides an easy-to-integrate payment gateway, which […]
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Project Groups in jAlbum 35
jAlbum 35 is here! A new major release sets expectations, and I think you’ll appreciate this update, especially if you’re a long-time jAlbum user. v35 will help you keep your ever-growing list of jAlbum projects organized and presented in neat folder structures called Project Groups. Another improvement worth mentioning here is Project Previews – Just hover the mouse close […]
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Hosting hub in the US
TL;DR You can now have your albums hosted in the US if using jAlbum storage. Try now! If you are using our storage (Premium, Power, or Super) your files have always been on servers located in Sweden. This is good for most of our users since most of our customers are in Europe. But we […]
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Our newest old skin
This week we’ve released our once most favored, Chameleon skin’s successor, Lizard. Remember Chameleon, which was once our most popular skin, characterized by grid-style layout, and skeuomorphic buttons? (Means: mimicking real-life objects.) This new skin was created to fill the void left by Chameleon after we stopped developing it because its architecture no longer suited […]
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jAlbum 34 is here
jAlbum 34 is here. With improved ordering, navigation, and Multi Maker, this release focuses on the needs of power users who maintain large galleries and many projects. Here’s all you need to know: Many of our users maintain many or large galleries with thousands of images and hundreds of folders. jAlbum is appreciated by both […]
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Great reasons to upgrade to v33
If you’re an old-time jAlbum user who hasn’t upgraded jAlbum for quite some time, then this is for you. Here we summarize major improvements we’ve made in the last two years (since v25). jAlbum is as relevant today as it was back then as values like integrity and control never go out of style, but […]
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This is jAlbum 33
jAlbum 33 is here, adding tools for easy backup and restore of projects, and comes with more user-friendly settings. Let’s dive right into it. New settings window Based on support experience, we’ve reworked jAlbum’s settings window to be more user-friendly. The first thing you notice is that it has a much smaller window than before. […]
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Skin news – 2023 summer
Every year we add more and more functionality and features to our skins. 2023 isn’t different in this regard. You might have noticed that a handful of our bundled skins recently received major updates. It started with a Samples page redesign – which hasn’t been deployed yet – so you can enjoy these enhancements even […]
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Presenting jAlbum 32
We’re proudly presenting jAlbum 32 to you. Here’s why you should get it: Improved WebP writer Now jAlbum produces far smaller and less blocky WebP images again. When we first introduced WebP images, it was clear that WebP produces the same quality images as JPEG, but uses less disk space. We however eventually needed to […]
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This Changes Everything
I dare to claim that jAlbum v31 is the most important update we’ve made in years. Bold words, but even skeptics agree. This release brings jAlbum closer to your mobile phone than ever. We now use QR codes to ease everything from adding images and videos from your phone to previewing galleries on your phone […]
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Meet Plain Skin
Over the years, as jAlbum evolved, we have added more and more features to our bundled skins, and finally, – I must admit – many of them became as complex as a NASA mission control room. I see how this can be intimidating to newcomers. Most people just want a simple album with no bells, […]
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Meet Gerry Murray
It’s inspiring to see the work of talented people and hear how they use jAlbum. jAlbum has many skilled users, ranging from photo enthusiasts, travelers, and hobbyists to professional photographers and organizations sharing their activities. We also see companies showcasing products. I’ve interviewed one such company: gerrymurray.co.uk, which is a collective of graphic artists based […]
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Look sharp with jAlbum 30.1
jAlbum 30.1 is a “sharp” release 😉. When we introduced Variants back in 2021, the galleries were given extra sharpness by providing higher-resolution images for screens where it matters. Now, the thumbnails within the jAlbum software appear super sharp as well. Here’s a comparison: For this example, I zoomed jAlbum’s thumbnails to max size using the […]
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jAlbum 30 is here!
Jay! We’ve just released jAlbum v30! This release has four highlights that we’ll cover in this blog post: Excited to know more? Let’s go! Pixelate region tool Web galleries are public in nature, but sometimes you find yourself needing to protect the identity of an individual, or a car registration plate for instance. Historically this […]
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New Year – New Story
Entering 2023 we have just released a new major version of Story skin. Story skin is known for its ability to produce page layouts with mixed content – text blocks, thumbnails, larger images, and subfolders an exciting way. Now we made the experience even smoother by adding new thumbnail layouts, and new barebone styles, and […]
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No more character encoding problems
With jAlbum 29.3, we’ve added a setting that puts an end to character encoding problems. If you’ve ever had difficulties displaying galleries with file names containing so-called “foreign” characters like “é, è, ü, Á and å”, tick this checkbox under Settings -> Advanced -> Naming: Just tick it and jAlbum will use the “base characters” […]
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jAlbum welcomes M1
With the introduction of jAlbum 29, we now offer a version that runs natively on Apple’s M-series chips. This boosts performance significantly. Earlier versions of jAlbum have been relying on Apple’s “Rosetta 2” emulation to convert Intel code to the ARM64 / AArch64 code that Apple’s M-series chips use. If it wasn’t for the impressive […]
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jAlbum 29. To the future and beyond
Tons of improvements rather than tons of new features. That could summarize jAlbum 29. We now also support Apple’s new M-series computers, boosting performance 3x compared to the Intel-based jAlbum version With jAlbum 29, we’ve leaped Java 14 to 19. That’s 5 generations of major Java releases, including tons of fixes for various platforms and […]
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How to deal with Google Fonts “data breach”?
Update: Since 09/2022 all the bundled skin can download Google fonts, and use them locally, which does not fall under the scope of the GDPR law. Just turn on Settings / skinName / Advanced / Copy Google Fonts to the album. Recently, we’ve heard some German users were threatened by law firms, because of the […]
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Let your galleries speak!
With the freshly released jAlbum 28, your galleries can speak! Each image can now have an audio clip that plays automatically as you move through the gallery. This is great for instructional-type galleries like this one, or why not spice up your birds’ gallery with chirping bird sounds? You can record audio from within jAlbum […]
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Celebrating 20 years
This year we’re celebrating jAlbum’s 20th anniversary! Very few software titles have such a lifespan. When I released jAlbum back in February 2002, there was no social media. If you wanted to share images over the web, you needed your site. That’s no longer the case, and today we face competition from software giants offering […]
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Merry Christmas. jAlbum 26 is free!
Merry Christmas! Yes, it’s true. For the first time in a decade, we’re offering jAlbum for free*. Back in 2012, jAlbum went from freeware to be offered under a 30-day trial. This has worked out fairly well (hey, we’re still around…), but we think that people like you and I are far more positive about […]
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How database-driven skins work
Simple web photo albums put all images (a.k.a thumbnails) on an HTML page and offer to view them in larger size either on the same page (dynamic) or on a separate “slide” page (static). However, when a gallery author wants to enrich the album with advanced functions – like search or tags – using a […]
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Skin UI philosophy
You might ask, what is UI at all? UI is the acronym for User Interface, which sometimes we refer to as GUI too – “Graphical” UI. In this blog post, I’ll explain how my skins’ user interfaces are organized and why. A skin’s UI contains all the settings that control how the album will look […]
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jAlbum 25 – a time saver for power users
Many of our users regularly update their galleries. This is for you! Being a desktop app, supporting folder hierarchies, jAlbum lends itself well to managing huge image volumes regularly. We see many users, especially organizations, update their galleries weekly. In v25 we’ve taken several steps aiming at making your life easier: * Measured on a […]
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jAlbum 24 is here!
jAlbum 24 is here, reading and writing new, better image formats than JPEG and delivering images that fit the client’s screen better than ever. We’re also bundling jAlbum with two major skin updates and some other improvements. It’s been a long time since we released a major version, but I hope you’ll find these improvements […]
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Tiger skin reborn
Most of you have probably met Tiger skin. Meanwhile, new web design techniques appeared in other skins often quite early, I was afraid of rushing to introduce them in our most frequently used skin, Tiger. This way it got gradually left behind in terms of design and also made it harder to maintain code shared […]
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Albums are now faster when hosted at jalbum.net
A few weeks ago we enabled HTTP/2 for all albums hosted here that are using https. This is done automatically, so there is no need to upload your albums again. Just make sure you access your albums using https. Using HTTP/2 makes the albums load much faster, especially over long distances.We have checked what HTTP/2 […]
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Which jAlbum skin?
While jAlbum comes with 8 preinstalled skins, you can find dozens more in our skins section. As shown on the chart below, most users simply stick with the default skin, or whatever the default was when they first installed jAlbum. Turtle still holds second place, even though we retired it years ago and released Tiger […]
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Skin development news 2021/02
Whatever might happen around us, we never stop bringing new features to jAlbum and our bundled skins. 🙂 Most of these ideas came from our helpful community which is a tremendous help for us, the development team. Here are a few new things added recently: Continuous zoom, zooming into the original image When you aim […]
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Automate it!
It’s sound human nature to avoid doing repetitive tasks. jAlbum was once developed as I didn’t want to manually prepare 120 images for the web and create the needed HTML. Even if jAlbum has a good number of batch processing features, you may find yourself doing manual repetitive work, for instance deleting 1-star images, looking […]
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What’s new on the skin development front?
While we often communicate what’s new with jAlbum, only a few of you follow the advancements in skin development by reading those hidden skin update logs. Here are some of the most interesting new skin features. It all started with Story skin, which made custom pages even more useful, by allowing them to hold just […]
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Presenting jAlbum 23
jAlbum 23 is here, listing a whopping 17 improvements and 15 bug fixes. As always you’ll find the full list in our release notes. Here I’ll give you an overview of the most notable improvements. Performance Don’t you hate it when software grows larger and slower over time? We do. Every now and then we […]
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8 reasons to update to jAlbum 22
In the past 18 years we have never stopped improving jAlbum. The last two years are no exceptions. Here we present what we think are the top 8 reasons to update jAlbum based on recent improvements. 1 Be compatible The world around us is changing, so are web standards and the use of mobile devices. […]
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jAlbum 22 highlights
Syntax highlighting and the new Multi Maker jAlbum 22 is here and comes with 17 improvements and bug fixes. Here are 3 improvements I think are especially welcome: The new Multi-maker Ever wanted to be able to continue using jAlbum while making albums in the background? Ever wanted to make and upload several albums in one […]
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Projector 2.0
We’ve released Projector 2.0 a few days ago. The big news is the interactive preview on the User Interface which makes customizing the skin a lot easier; you don’t have to Make Album and Preview every time to test a color or a particular setting. Naturally, this preview cannot reflect the effect of every setting, […]
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Group images by calendar events
If you’re a heavy user of your computer’s calendar and have loads of unorganized images, then you’ll love jAlbum 20.2’s new “Organize by calendar” feature that can tag and group (move into folders) images by matching calendar events, judging by the camera date. Here I have set up a “Seasons” calendar within Apple’s Calendar app […]
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jAlbum Bridge reborn for WordPress’ new Block Editor
In October 2018, when I released jAlbum Bridge I had no idea WordPress would replace its post editor (TinyMCE) with a completely new one (Gutenberg, later Block Editor) in two months. Unfortunately, the new editor was not backward compatible, and even more unfortunately they failed to provide comprehensive documentation at that time. I must admit […]
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Tell your story with the new Story skin
Half a year ago one user called our attention to a gallery made with Adobe Spark. Besides the stunning photos, the page design was also modern and sexy. It went beyond the confines of a traditional web album, with lengthy texts between photos and stylish animations. This type of use has escaped our attention so […]
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Presenting jAlbum 20
18 years have passed since we first released jAlbum 1.0. We've now reached v20. Not that many software titles stay around for so many years so we're proud that jAlbum is still relevant, and now it's better than ever. There are about a dozen changes in this release, but here I'll focus on the top […]
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Meet the new rating widget and play with photo data!
While developing the Filtering and Sort feature for Tiger (and Photoblogger) my mental model was a webshop where you can sophistically filter the products. However, a few users have suggested another use: filtering images by their “metadata” – the data added by the camera. This is something I always wanted to play with too. You […]
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Online jAlbum is now 100% Flash free!
In the shadow of our big desktop client is our less known (and used) online jAlbum, which is a web based and simplified version of jAlbum that our Premium and Power storage customers can use. It's great when you want to create an album and don't have access to your main computer. It has been […]
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jAlbum interviewed in WebsitePlanet
I was recently interviewed by web software and services review site WebsitePlanet.com. If you're curious about what keeps a founder like me going after so many years with jAlbum (started in 2002) and my views on the trends and risks in this industry, you'll find this interview interesting. I'll promise that reading it will give […]
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Introducing Lucid skin
When it comes to multi-level, elaborated albums (with all the bells & whistles) jAlbum is the natural choice for many photographers. However, sometimes you want something simple – although professional-looking – for your site. For instance when you’d like to share an event right away or show some photos related to your business. Historically, we […]
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Presenting jAlbum 19
I'm delighted to tell you about the news for our new jAlbum 19 release. The highlights consists of a significantly improved search bar and an embedded spell checker. This is naturally a free update for you who are on a current support & update plan (sign in here or see jAlbum Help for your status). For […]