Going for a two digit version number calls for something out of the ordinary. With jAlbum 10 we belive we will meet your expectations with several improvements geared towards the needs of professionals. Let's go through some of the highlights. Read about all the improvements in our release notes.
Full xmp metadata support
jAlbum 10 now reads and writes image specific metadata to the images as xmp. For you, this means that you can relocate an image file outside of jAlbum without losing the captions, titles and ratings you've applied to that image. Moreover, as jAlbum adheres to an open standard for storing metadata, you can now pick up metadata entered in jAlbum in other xmp aware applications like Adobe Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom and vice versa: Ratings set in Lightroom are picked up by jAlbum for instance.
xmp is an open standard for storing image metadata within image files developed by Adobe. Being xml based, it's far more extensible than the older binary formats EXIF and IPTC and doesn't carry some of the drawbacks those formats have (for instance flawed support for foreign characters).
jAlbum continues to update its own metadata control files too just to stay compatible with older versions if you would for some reason want to use an older version of jAlbum. jAlbum 10 also includes an "external tool" called "Copy file metadata to xmp" that you can use to inject xmp metadata into the images of an existing album project from jAlbum's own control files. After running that tool, the metadata you've entered is now carried along with each image.
jAlbum 10 introduces a new property edit panel where you can edit author, keywords, copyright, copyright URL and flag ("Label" in Adobe terms). A property value can easily be applied to all images of the current folder by right clicking it and selecting "Apply to all", so if you wish to copyright all images with "(C) David Ekholm", enter "(C) David Ekholm" into the copyright field, then right click and select "Apply to all". To have this xmp metadata written to the images of the final album too, make sure to select "Include photographic data in generated images" under Advanced album settings->Metadata.
Note: If you don't want jAlbum to update the image files with xmp metadata then you can switch off xmp writing under jAlbum preferences, and if you wish to ignore reading XMP metadata, that can be set on a project-by-project basis under Advanced album settings->Metadata.
Flagging images
A flag is a color based keyword that you can tag images with. The original intention with these colors is to help assist with the image filtering/evaluation process but it's naturally up to you what meaning to assign to different colors. As you flip through the images in full screen mode, use keys 0-5 to rate them and keys 6-9 to color flag them. You can also flag images in jAlbum's edit view. When you're back in jAlbum's thumbnail view, you can activate the filter bar (CTRL+F on Windows and CMD+F on Mac) and use the new color buttons to filter for certain colors.
Support for more image formats
jAlbum 10 supports a wider range of image formats thanks to the use of a new image reading library (http://commons.apache.org/sanselan). Most noteworthy is the new TIFF support and basic support for PSD (one layer only), but the new library also supporsts some less known formats like PNM, PGM, PBM, and PPM. jAlbum still always writes JPEGs though.
Easy embedding
Many of you run blogs and web sites and don't want your albums to take over the whole browser window – you want to visually embed the album in a certain region of a web page instead. jAlbum 10 simplifies this process by generating the embed code for you. After uploading an album, jAlbum can display an embed code that you simply copy and paste to your web site or blog. By default jAlbum generates an iframe based embed code, but skin developers can generate their own embed code by supplying their own "embed.htt" template file. (jAlbum's default embed.htt template is located under system/embed.htt). Some skins aren't suitable for embedding, and with many skins you may need to remake the album with somewhat smaller image- and thumbnail sizes in order for the album to fit within the area you designate to it. The Mr.Burns skin is very well suitable for embedding, as you can see by the album in this blog post.
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