Category: jAlbum news

Congratulations all Canon camera owners. You are the leading majority of all Jalbum users when it comes to using your camera. A couple of months ago we decided to do a little data-crunching project to investigate what kind of cameras we as a community prefer. We crunched all the albums on our servers and extracted…

  Right now the site twitter is down. Rumors say that Facebook is having problems too. It's a massive hysteria out there and we hope nothing bad happened. We love Twitter and hope it's back soon. Follow the news on Techcrunch, Mashable or silicon alley insider, or watch some albums here Jalbum albums instead.  …

We've made an update to the "About" widget. It now displays more info about you (the photographer) and the album. The About widget is an easy way for you to give your visitors more background about what they are viewing. Here's the info that the About widget displays: – User name / Name– Location– Link…

It's always fun to go to the Zoo. In the northern part of the world, it's even more fun to go during the summer when they let the animals outdoors. See how much fun these Jalbumers had on their visits:   Album by: johNson-iNsomnia   Album by lkshieldsphotos   Album by divebee66   Album by…

Unless you live in the Arctic you generally don’t have to be afraid of polar bears. Still, there is something about this picture that make me watch my steps the next times I walk alone in the northern Sweden next December. Images have a way to touch us like words cannot. Here are a few…

  Psst… The Photo book contest Photography.Book.Now is due July 16!  We all go around thinking about creating a photo book for our best photos. Why not do it now and take the chance to win 25 000 USD? No matter where you live in the world you may submit your contribution. This is how…

Photo District News is a great resource for professional photographers both online and in print. The offer an array of camera reviews, photography biographies and stock photo galleries, PDNOnline.com is packed with news on everything Photography related. Now PDN invites all Jalbumers to enter the 2009 PDN Photographers' Self-Promo Awards. Amateurs and professionals are welcome…

"Faces" by Iprevost   "People" by huy   "People" by yumi-la   Album by amirweiz  

Enjoy the world under water with these great Jalbums: Album by timso Album by jamesmallard Album by Palantar Album by RBA Album by gcolin

  When photographers first learn about compositional guidelines, such as the rule of thirds, they are often subconsciously bound by these parameters. One thing to keep in mind is that if an image is symmetrical, or has a triangular appearance to it, a centered composition often works best. For the above image, if the door…

We recently tried the new search engine from Microsoft called Bing.  It has a neat look with a calming background that seem to change from day to day. As photo enthusiasts, we think that is a nice feature. But wait, what happens when we hit the search button; the search result comes up and the…

    PhotoBox is the latest and greatest skin from our code ninja Kristoffer. The skin has a nice feature where image thumbnails zoom and float gracefully when touched by the mouse pointer. It's a great way to preview images before watching the full blown photo. Have a look at this sample album. PhotoBox works…

  Have you submitted your work to the photo book contest Photography.Book.Now by Blurb? It truly is your chance for worldwide recognition and also getting paid for your dedicated work as a photographer. $25,000 is at stake for the one winner with the most impressive work. Also there are several photography related prizes for the…

    This release looks pretty much the same on the outside, but don't let the surface fool you. Jalbum 8.3 is packed with improvements under the hood. For instance, twice the speed on smooth image scaling, and a significantly faster and tighter album publishing. We've also made it easier to import settings from previous…

  I bet you’ve heard the quote "Badges?… We don't need no… stinkin' badges!" from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, even if you never saw the movie. It’s amazing how a quote, a tune or a photo can awaken something inside all of us that is eternally memorable. To get your amazing photo albums…

  Last week we moved all of our servers to a new location – the ex nuclear bunker Pionen. The bunker is located 30 meters below ground and completely state of the art as well as an architectural wonder. The inspiration for the place was old sci-fi movies like Star Wars and Logan’s run. Plants…

Once again we've survived the long and dark winter! At least, that's how we feel in Sweden. Say good-bye to long shutter speed night shots and hello to sunny flower shots 🙂 This calls for celebration: Spring sale on Jalbum accounts! Take this opportunity to prepare your Jalbum account with more space for the summer…

User dragkhar organised a theme shoot with the topic "Architecture" some time ago where we saw architecture albums from all over the world. Now, he's putting together another fun shoot around a common subject. Here are his thoughts on the new theme: "So as I sat on the subway to work I just came up…

 Photo album by Lighthouse "Pictures from my last Travel thru Japan. The Galerie is made with Banana." Photo album by hochyi "Hochyi and Bomy's travel in Japan"  Photo album by Chris Frost "Pictures taken by my grandfather in Japan in 1907 and an account of his time in Japan. Use the clickable pictures to get…

Users have asked me how to make several albums using the same settings as an album they've previously made (and tweaked the settings for). There are several ways of doing this, but to simplify this task I've put together a Jalbum Tool that imports the settings of an existing album project onto the currently loaded…

In a previous blog post we told you about the project Jalbum Blog badge (beta) we are working on. It allows bloggers to place a widget in the sidebar of their blog that automatically updates with thumbnails to each album published with Jalbum. We're still keeping it in beta to test things out and to…

If you have an inkjet printer you might have asked yourself why there is no print support within Jalbum. Well now there is! I've now developed a printing plugin for Jalbum using the new plugin system of Jalbum 8. This is what it is capable of: It prints full size images (using the max dimensions…

Photo album by: ShinobiPictures   Photo album by: lorddavidnelson   Photo album by: sapanahuja Photo album by: cjh4y

    The default distribution of the texteditor jEdit has some problems on MacOS Leopard, it just won't start. I have created a patched version that works, you can download it from me if you drop me a message. 

 Do you use Facebook or Twitter? So do we! We have a group on Facebook called Jalbum where we publish blog posts from this blog and meet you guys. A bunch of the Jalbum team members are a part of this group if you want to get to know them up close. Our friendly frog…

We're intrigued by the diversity of albums being published with Jalbum. The Jalbum format being a collection of photos in a "photo album" rather than individual photos seem to inspire a lot of people to tell a story with their pictures. It makes exploring Jalbum albums interesting and a lot of fun! Here are a…

  Spring is in the air. In the northern parts of the world birds are returning home and life returns to fields and forests.  Now is a great time to bring some friends and shoot some beautiful photos of your surroundings. Creative life is also flourishing everywhere in the digital world. People are downloading skins…

We've seen a massive growth in the number of sign ups to our site since the launch of Jalbum Widgets and the latest usability changes made to Jalbum software. It's exciting to see people finding Jalbum from all corners of the world. To visually display the geographical spread of the Jalbum community, we've made an…

  Today we launched a brand new set of improvements. On your profile page you will find a collection of users that has added one or more of your albums as a favorite. In a way they are your "Fans". Go on and pay their profile page a visit to find likeminded people and more…

I just wanted to answer a question we get quite frequently right now. "Can I use widgets on my album even if it is not hosted on Jalbum?" Answer: yes you can. Widgets work on any album you create no matter where you put it. The only requirement is that you have to sign in…

User dragkhar recently initiated a theme shoot on the subject Architecture. We're seeing a lot of albums on that theme being published from all corners of the world. It's interesting to see the different interpretations of the theme, have a look:   Album by: strangeste   Album by: alan927   Album by: gbenic   Album…

We get a lot of requests from bloggers who want to integrate their Jalbum albums into blogs. Jalbum is appreciated by bloggers as they can customize photo albums to fit the look and feel of the blog and also for being able to publish it to their own domain. We've already made it easy to…

Today we have released Jalbum 8.2. With each release we have two main goals: Simplify the workflow for newcomers Empower advanced users At a glance, these dual goals might seem contradicting, but we firmly believe this is the balance we need to strike in order to satisfy the many existing users and at the same…

Are you like us you probably have your computer stuffed with digital photos from holidays, vacation and family members. The oldest pictures are dated at least two years back, the time where you bought your new digital camera.  You might have backed them up during the years but you don’t want to remove them from…

Photographing building exteriors is both easy and difficult. The easy part is finding subject matter . . . the difficult part is composing in a way that is both dynamic and original. The above image is a nice mixture of old and new architecture, and the vertical lines of both structures compliment each other. As…

  There are two things most people would search for when they try the Google search for the first time in their life; their name or their hometown.  At Jalbum there are a lot of people adding pictures of the latter one. Have you tried to search for the city you live in? And while…

Have you checked out the sharing options available for yours (and other users) albums? On all user "Album" pages there is a Share button on the right hand side of the album thumb. See user rsagebin's Album page as an example:     Clicking the Share button makes the share options appear:   As you…

Starting today, we are pleased to announce that even guests are able to comment on your albums when you have the commenting widget enabled on an album. This was the #1 requested widget improvement we received and we want to thank everyone in the community that suggested it!  Keep dreaming it and we'll keep building…

  User jboal shows how well Jalbum can be used to tell a story. In his album Inauguration he illustrates how he experienced the presidential inauguration day, the 20th of January. Each photo has a narrative description (caption) which makes it interesting to follow. He takes us with him as he walks to the Capital…

We are very happy to see all the kind words being written about Jalbum in different blogs, newspapers and software sites. Here are a few of the recently found articles:     Easily create a professional web photo album with Jalbum "Have you ever wished that you can create a beautiful online photo album and…

Our first third party Widget is called Name Tagger, and was created by Polar Rose. It helps you quickly name all the people in your album with the help of Face Detection and Face Recognition. Here is walkthrough of how this works: After enabling the Polar Rose widget, it will start showing up in the…

  This morning started out great as I stumbled upon an article in PC World about Jalbum:  Create Gorgeous Galleries with Jalbum I was very pleased to read the kind words from writer Ian Harac: "Jalbum is an easy-to-use freebie which can take folders of images on your hard disk and turn them into a…

I passed by Jalbum user dragkhar's board the other day and found that he's cooking up a fun happening:    I'm about to organize a joint theme happening and wondered if any of you might be insterested. What I have in mind is to come up with a theme for an album, we have a…

There are a lot of talented artists who display their paintings with Jalbum albums. Here are a few of these galleries:  Jalbum by rossabbott   Jalbum by deMim   Jalbum by genev   Jalbum by risuvan-sviat  

Did you know that you can add widgets to a Jalbum even if you host your albums on your own website?  You still need to create a free Jalbum account in order to add and administrate widgets, but where you publish the album is entirely up to you! Every time you sign in to the…

      In this new age of digital photography, it is sometimes nice to revert to a good solid film to record certain events. Even though I predominantly use professional digital cameras, there are certain subjects that just seem to require traditional film. I find that nature photography is better suited to slide film,…

It hasn't been a white winter thus far for the Jalbum office.  A couple of days of snow in mid November which disappeared as quickly as it came.  My brother's mother-in-law will be visiting us from Namibia for the holidays and it looks like her dream of seeing and touching snow for the first time…

    Jalbum has been free since 2002. Thanks to the tremendous support from the community we are able to keep it that way. Your contributions help us improve Jalbum and keep it free for everyone! Now when you sign in before donating you will get a heart badge next to your profile picture, showing…

So are you planning to buy a new digital camera for Christmas? Like most electronics there are a ton of things to consider. One thing that often misguide consumers is the message “The most megapixels win”. Older Digital single lens reflex cameras (DSLR) can take on modern compact digital cameras any time. The true limit…

A few weeks ago Carl gave you a preview of our new help center with a tutorial video showing a noob how to make their first Jalbum.  Well, we're happy to announce that we've now launched an all new help center with a new FAQ and five new tutorials to help anyone get started making…

    Our friends over at Polar Rose have made a major update to their Name Tagger Widget. They have made it a lot easier to tag people in albums by matching faces, which means that you can tag one person who appears in many photos in one go! Sounds pretty neat huh? Well, here's…

A digital photo frame is the number one item on many people wish list this Christmas. They come in many different shapes and designs. The best thing is that prices are dropping like rocks in a pond due to competition and a global wide demand. One feature that really gets us enthusiastic is the possibility…

I stumbled across a site/blog ran by Chris Pirillo (chris.pirillo.com) who's lifecasting to tens of thousands of viewers, and is also a top subscribed partner on YouTube. I was delighted to find that he recently discovered Jalbum and shared his experience with his audience in this video. Thanks for the kudos Chris!  

Since we released Jalbum 8.1 and Widgets a couple of days ago, it's been exciting to see all new and old users trying out Widgets. Being able to build converstions around images and give feedback have been on top of the Jalbum wish-list for a lot of us. As always it's great to see the…

  We have been running Jalbum 8.1 in beta mode for quite some time now to test the new Jalbum Widgets. Finally we are ready to officially launch this baby! With the release of Jalbum Widgets, you can for the first time incorporate face detection and tagging, build conversations around images, monitor popularity and enable…

I finally caved and got myself a new Iphone.  My P1i just didn't want to sync with my MacBook.  Yes, the Jalbum office is 100% apple except for a testing machine in the darkest corner of the office.  One great thing about the Iphone is of course the Safari browser.  We're still waiting for Flash…

  Jalbum user chero is sharing her fantastic trip to South Georgia, an Antarctic island. The trip starts from Mar del Plata on the coast of Argentina where you board the ship Ushuaia. The expedition lasts for 16 days and takes you to South Georgia, home of penguins, seals, sea elephants and other exotic animals.…

A few weeks ago we stumbled upon a CNET review of a new Desktop PC.  We were delighted to see that they are now using Jalbum as a testing standard to benchmark the performance of computers there!  It might be because we're free (the economy is tanking after all), or maybe because we're available on…

Today skin developer alt released updates to all his immensely popular flash skins. The updates make these five skins compatible with the upcoming release of Jalbum 8.1 and Widgets. If you haven't tried these skins out, it's about time. I can garantee that you'll impress your friends!  Skin: PostcardViewer Skin: PageFlip   Skin: Autoviewer  …

 This technique works very well with flowers in the late afternoon or early morning, when the sun is low in the sky. Set your lens aperture (f-stop) to the lowest number possible, which will give your image a shallow depth of field. Compose your photo so that the flowers or buds that are closest to…

Lots of photographers out there edit their images in some way before they show them off to the world.  There's certainly no shame in that!  Not everyone advertises the fact, however. A search for "Photoshop" showed me that some people are proud of their Photoshop creations or manipulations and aren't afraid to admit it!  Jalbum…

We're building a whole new help section for the site. The aim is to provide a help center that is easy to navigate so you can find answers to your Jalbum questions quickly. We are also putting together some video tutorials to go along with that. You'll see the first attempt below called "Publish your…

It’s truly exiting times within the Jalbum team. We have a reached a point where we are more focused than ever. A couple of weeks ago we spent two whole days in a room with a whyteboard and a video projector. We looked at what the other photo sharing sites are doing right now, which…

No, I'm not referring to bugs on our site (are there any?). Here are some Jalbums which bring us close to some spectacular, and sometimes scary bugs: Jalbum by Konia2007 Jalbum by Kya   Jalbum by gertjan   Jalbum by jeromego  

  Jalbum by BittenByAZebra: "These are some images that I captured during election night 2008 in Times Square and Rockefeller Center."  

Autumn is here which is appearent while browsing Jalbum albums. Here are a few Jalbums showing the off the beautiful colors of the season:  Jalbum by enviZioning   Jalbum by Jedermann    Jalbum by wayfarerr   Jalbum by EarlyOut   Jalbum by dgrd1701

Today, skin developer EarlyOut released the next generation of his popular skin Matrix 4.0. The Matrix skin provides an easy to use interface, making it a delightful experience to browse through your photos. Matrix is ram-packed with features, here are some of the highlights in version 4: SlideshowClick the Play button, sit back and enjoy…

Here are some fantastic black and white Jalbums that caught the attention today:  Jalbum "My favorite shots" by Greg Benic Jalbum by stephanedescure Jalbum by Svein-Jorgen Wiken Jalbum by my-place  

There's no shortage of interesting Jalbums to explore in our Explore section. Here are three Jalbums we've noticed in the featured albums:  Jalbum by: MisterMattias  Jalbum by: discordia Jalbum by: homme  

It’s day one here at the web conference Future of web apps in London. Carl and me headed of to the conference hall ExCel at 8.30. Today we have listened to brilliant speeches around technology and how great services work. Everybody from small startups in San Francisco and the UK to corporations and media companies…

If you have come from a photography school, or have been part of a photography organization that judges your photos, you may have lingering phobias of improperly composing your photographs (due to the heavy hand that is about to "correct" you!). When it comes to fine art photography, there is no need to follow the…

  The enormous exhibition of professional photographers called Visual Gallery is a must for photography suckers like us. The Visual Gallery displays the work of internationally known photographers and award-winning photo artists. One of the most popular acts at this year's exhibition is the work by the actor and director Dennis Hopper. Before becoming a…

  They are everywhere and everyone seem to be making them. Digital photo frames were introduced in 2006 but it's this year when you'll likely see them populate your friends book shelves. The digital photo frame is the photo gadget at Photokina 2008. Now, these frames don't make us jump up and down. However, when…

  The world of photo enthusiasts are meeting up in Cologne, Germany this week for the bianual photo excibition Photokina 2008. Being the largest photo industry event in the world, it gathers more than 1500 companies from 45 countries to present their latest products and services. Among 160,000 other visitors, Jalbum reps Anders and myself…

Most of us are all returning from summer vacation and the time has come to transfer all the photos from your digital camera to the computer. Why not polish the photos a bit before putting them online. This is a wonderful time to discover the Jalbum photo editing tools. This blog post will just give…

If you are selling (or hope to soon be selling) your travel photos to the publishing world, don’t forget images that also represent the idea of travel. Depending on flight connections, you can be sitting around in an airport for hours doing nothing. Why not try to get some candid shots that show movement, and…

Have you ever wanted to have the look and feel of a real photo album for your online photos? Just like the one standing in your bookshelf with pictures that were taken before you bought a digital camera. With the PageFlip skin you can. This flash-based skin lets you view your photos like a photobook,…

An easy way to get your flower photos to look like a painting:1. Put your camera on Aperture Priority and set your lens to its lowest f-stop number. In this case, a 50mm f1.4 lens works best, but use whatever you have.2. If you are using digital, set your camera’s saturation level to high, and…

It’s so much fun browsing Jalbum albums and to explore different interests, talents and teqniques. Check out the album from user flygfoto who’s taking photos with the help of a radio controlled helicopter!   Photo album by: flygfoto  Photo album by: flygfoto

If for any reason you would like to replicate the look of early color film, and are using Photoshop, here are a few tips: 1. Dress your subject in appropriately aged clothing.2. Find an interior that is difficult to date (the era . . . not dinner and a movie)3. Create a vertical composition. In…

Long time Jalbum supporter and skin developer Armond has done a tremendous contribution to the Jalbum community. This time he is calling for your help as he and his family are going through hard times. We are all with you Armond. These are his words: Dear JAlbum Lovers, This is Armond, author of BluPlusPlus skin,…

It’s offical… We have boldly labeled our site logo with better instead of beta, and I must admit it was my silly idea 🙂 But there is something of importance in this little stunt. We felt that saying that our site was beta after several months of real usage was like saying: "things might not…

We’ve had a "Beta" tag stuck to the Jalbum logo on the site for a while to indicate that our new community site is still in a very early stage. We are far from where we want to take this site but we’ve made some improvements and decided to change the tag to "Better" 🙂…

 The Jalbum community is full of talent, hobby enthusiasts, aspiring artists, professionals and world class photographers.  Eric von Lockhart is a world famous photographer who’s celebrity photos include: Beyoncé, Mary J Blidge, Alicia Keys and Christina Milian. He has been featured on Hollywood Access, CNN and MTV and recieved numerous awards. We are very happy…

If you are a photographer who has amassed a large collection of good quality images, you may want to send a portfolio submission to a stock photography agency. It is the agent’s job to market your images for you, which frees up more time for you to photograph. Here are a few things to keep…

Alan927 has updated the Jalbum Skin Viewer. Skins that require Flash now have a black "F" icon next to them and Javascript skins have a red "J" (both with alt and title text in case you mouseover). If you’re looking for a skin specifically made in Flash, HTML or Javascript, it’s easier than ever to…

Portrait albums from the featured albums:  Photo album by: momentum  Photo album by: fredricks Photo album by: hansslegers

A lot of professional web sites use Jalbum to display their photo albums, it’s easy to customize the album to fit with the rest of the site. Here’s a German travel agency called Colibri Hotels who arranges adventure trips to exotic places like Antarctica. Have a look at these pictures from this spectacular place on…

We’re stunned by the amount of talented photographers in the Jalbum community. Have a look at our featured album section or most favored albums and see for yourself! There is a never ending range of themes, presentations and techniques. Here are three albums taken with the High Dynamic Range technique:  Photo album by: ridder –…

The lack of a photo studio may be keeping you from trying your hand at fashion photography. Many fashion photographers begin by photographing outdoors, which can produce great results with the right background. There seems to always be young men or women who would gladly trade modeling for portfolio photos; you get a free model,…

Last week David and Carl were in London and had the chance to meet up with MarkE, who’s a long time dedicated Jalbum supporter. Mark has helped thousands of Jalbum users over the years, so it was a true pleasure to swing some beers with him and share some Jalbum experiences. See you in Stockholm…

Can’t decide what skin to use for your album? The skin section is filled with creative ways of presenting your photos built by the Jalbum community. Now, we have tried to make it easy for you to search and find the perfect skin by presenting skins in different lists. However, we haven’t had a convenient…

We’re seeing more and more blogs writing about Jalbum, which is wonderful. Thanks to all of you who are spreading the word about Jalbum, it means a lot to us. Here are two recent articles from a couple of nice sites: The article is called: Jalbum ups the Ante. Thanks for the write up Liz! …

We have received tremendous feedback since we started the Jalbum hosting in October last year, and we’re (read: Johan) working on improving the hosting every day. As we started out, we chose to keep the hosting accounts to a separate domain (myjalbum.net). However, we have noticed that this causes some confusion and we’ve decided to…

The Jalbum software runs on all major operating systems including Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris etc. Wanna see how it looks like on Ubuntu? An enthusastic user, Svend Nielsen, has made a video showing Jalbum on Ubuntu. Thanks for sharing Svend 🙂      

It makes our eyes wet to read the wonderful words from the fine people over at Download.com 🙂 If the article is not present on the front page of Download.com when you read this, here is the full article. Thanks for the write up! 

We are very proud to present the next generation of the Jalbum software: Jalbum 8.  The new version is packed with goodies, just waiting for you to be explored. Here are a few of the new features: User interface now completely supports drag and drop. Arrange files and folders between folders too New image editor…

Our friends at Blurb recently introduced a new book format. ImageWrap is a new hardcover book option that lets you print text and images directly on the front and back of your books, each area will wrap smoothly over the edge of your book. ImageWrap books also feature a durable matte finish. They’re beautiful. Take me…

We have made it easier to share your own or your favorite albums on other websites and social networks like Facebook, Digg and Myspace. The ”Share” button is available next to your Albums and Favorites at jalbum.net.

We have received a lot of requests for search on jalbum.net. We have now added a smooth search function to the site to help you find interesting albums. You are able to search for both albums and users. It has never been easier to find new inspiration for your own photography as well as enjoying…