Author: Laca Molnar

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

While most people use jAlbum to share simple albums, filtering and sorting the thumbnails comes in handy for visitors in complex albums and webshops. jAlbum’s database-backed skins – e.g. Photoblogger and Tiger – can handle huge amounts of data making it easy to find and order images as visitors wish. This filtering and sorting functionality…

Photoblogger was my first attempt at creating a database-driven skin. Using a database, albums receive a superpower: global search, tag filtering, and new image collection, so visitors can easily find the images they´re after. In the meantime a few new skins came with database support too – e.g. Tiger and Projector – with better coding…

Grab some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy our newest skin – Projector. It was made to offer the best slideshow experience. Yet we didn’t forget about popular features like search, tags, or maps like those found in Tiger skin. The layout consists of 3 main sections: the sidebar (function buttons), the cover page (folder info,…

I believe one of the main reasons people choose jAlbum over simpler solutions is the wide choice of interaction possibilities the skins offer. For instance, Turtle skin has offered a so-called feedback tool, through which visitors could leave feedback. When I made the new Tiger skin, my goal was to offer nearly the same functionality…

Albums today are complex pieces of code. Starting with images and videos coming from various sources, processed through jAlbum and skins authored by many developers, the albums are uploaded to very different servers, utilize tons of 3rd party services over the internet, and are viewed on a multitude of device types, be it a mobile,…

Perhaps the title is misleading, but we’re still not in the poaching business. Our skin’s purpose is much more noble, I bet you already know. 🙂 I made a few sample albums to test how the skin works from the user’s perspective. This little exercise was also beneficial for facing everyday problems – you might…

Responsive Web Design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images, and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. Smashing Magazine Although I am still an evolutionist,…