Jalbum 8.13 (released today) aims at improving Jalbum as a backup and restore service for your images. As you face the upload confirmation dialog, there is now a new checkbox that lets you include high resolution images with your album.
These images are uploaded just after your album has been uploaded, so including high resolution images doesn't affect the time it takes to upload and share the album itself. It naturally affects disk space, but we've tried to strike a good balance between space consumption, "printability" and upload time. These images are scaled to 2048×2048 pixel, which makes for good prints up to 14×14" (35cm), still a typical file size is at around 500KB, which is far smaller than most original images coming from today's digital cameras. If you don't like this option, just untick the checkbox, and it will be remembered. The same goes if you wish to remove high resolution images from an uploaded album: Just upload it again, this time with the checkbox unticked. The high resolution images are scaled to RAM memory and then uploaded, so they don't take up local disk space.
Restore an album
Let's say disaster has struck and your local hard disk has crashed. If you have included high resolution images (or the originals) when you uploaded your album, then you luckily have a decent backup to retrieve from the server you uploaded to. Connect to the relevant server using "Tools->Publish/Manage", you will now see the folders (albums) of the remote server listed in a window:
Just right click on the album folder to restore and select "Download". Jalbum will ask you where you wish to store the album on your local disk and then download the album. If you inspect the album, you should find any original images straight inside the album folder and any hi-res images under "hi-res" subfolders of the downloaded album.
Even though this operation helps you to retrieve your images after a disaster, you will still have to perform some steps to recreate the album project that was the base for this album (so you can update it in the future). We aim to provide tools to simplify this process in the future. For now, there is one "External tool" (see "Tools->External tools-> Import comments from rss file") that helps you recreate your image captions from an album.
So, what do you think of this? I'm happy for any feedback!
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