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Transform Your Photography Website from a Pretty Gallery to a Sales Tool
What you as a photography lover need to understand about making your website work. Right, let’s have a proper chat about photography websites. Whether you’re dreaming of turning your photography passion into something more, or you’re already taking the occasional paid shoot, there’s something important you need to understand about websites. Your website isn’t just […]
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Introducing the new Split skin
In jAlbum’s early days, many skins, such as SimpleViewer, displayed thumbnails and large images side by side. This layout worked wonderfully when users primarily had large, landscape-oriented monitors. However, the advent of mobile phones made these galleries feel cramped and difficult to navigate. As a result, thumbnails and lightboxes evolved into separate entities, and users […]
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“Peeking” in jAlbum
The new “peek” feature of jAlbum 37.5 allows you to see quick closeups of thumbnail images. Simply long-click a thumbnail to activate peek. This demo shows “peek” in action:
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3 good reasons to upgrade
We’ve made numerous improvements to jAlbum in the last few years. To save you time, here’s a condensed summary of the top 3 reasons to upgrade to jAlbum 37 based on improvements made the last two years alone. Before proceeding, let me say that jAlbum is more relevant than ever, given the turbulent political times […]
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Business Plan for Photography: A Guide to Success
Starting a photography business requires more than just talent behind the camera—it takes strategic planning, clear goals, and a solid business plan. Whether you’re a seasoned professional photographer looking to go full-time or just starting out, a successful photography business plan will set the foundation for your success. Why You Need a Business Plan A […]
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Updated RAW processing
jAlbum 37.1 continues the focus on performance improvement you saw with the v37 release by significantly enhancing the support for RAW images. How about this: At the core of the improved RAW support lies an updated native code library called LibRaw. We’re now using the most current version (v24). The earlier version we used goes […]
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How to Find Photography Clients – 10 Proven Strategies
In the competitive world of photography, securing and retaining clients is key to success. Whether you are launching your photography business or looking to scale up, knowing where to find potential clients and how to engage them effectively can make all the difference. Key Takeaways: Explore jAlbum to professionally showcase your photography work with an […]
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Google Maps Platform changes in 2025
I just received a notification from Google that, effective March 1st, it is changing its policy on the Google Maps API, including the free usage limits. I always felt uneasy about giving out my Credit Card to companies, saying, “You’re welcome to charge as much as you wish.” When Google removed the free use in […]
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jAlbum 37 – simply faster
I’m truly excited about this release because we’ve been able to speed up jAlbum in many ways. How about this: This post will outline how we’ve been able to achieve such dramatic improvements, but let me first reflect on why I’m extra excited about this: It simply feels great to be able to deliver this […]
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Storytelling Photography: Capturing Stories Through the Lens
Storytelling photography is a style that uses images to convey a narrative filled with emotion and context. Unlike traditional photography, which often emphasizes technical perfection, visual storytelling or narrative photography focuses on capturing the essence of a moment, a character, or an event in a way that resonates with viewers. Whether through a series of […]
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jAlbum runs (almost) everywhere
Of course, you’re aware that jAlbum is available for both Windows and macOS, and you likely know it runs on Linux as well. But did you know jAlbum can operate virtually anywhere Java is supported? On a tiny $15 computer smaller than a credit card? Or on a handheld games console? The Raspberry Pi single-board […]
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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 […]