jAlbum 10.3 is here

Happy new 2012 everyone! I hope you've had a relaxing Christmas vacation. 

Yesterday we released jAlbum 10.3. The main improvements this time are as follows:

• More memory conservative
• Supports reading JPEG images in the CMYK color space
• Support for hidden sub albums
• Can generate seach engine friendly file names

As always, you can see the full list of improvements and bug fixes in our release notes. Now let's go through these four improvements in detail:

More memory conservative

Some users generating albums with thousands of images have reported out-of-memory conditions. I can't promise that this won't ever happen again (some broken images can cause this) but we've reworked the album engine to avoid accumulating image metadata during album build. Previous versions of jAlbum accumulated metadata for all processed images. You can imagine that to eventually cause out-of-memory conditions ;-).

The change made will cause some skins that rely on the "fileVariables object" to break (sorry for the tech talk). Until these skins are fixed you can either set jAlbum in "Compatibility mode" or just set that skin in "Compatibility mode" and things will work just like before. To set jAlbum in "Compatibility mode", open jAlbum Preferences and go to the "Advanced" tab. To just set the failing skin in "Compatibilty mode", press ALT+S and tick the "Compatibility mode" checkbox and save the changes.

CMYK images

Our users have been asking for jAlbum to support CMYK encoded JPEG images since 2003 so I'm happy to tell that we now finally read images using this color space. Most images are using the sRGB color space, and that's the preferred color space for web images, but for images intended to be printed eventually, the CMYK color space is richer. I wish to thank Werner Randelshofer for providing the 3:rd party library that makes this possible.

Hidden sub albums

You can now selectively hide sub albums (folders) from the thumbnail page listing, and media.rss file generation. This enables you to ensure that only those who knows the name of a sub album can access it. Just right-click on the sub albums (folders) you wish to hide and select "Hide" (then remake the album). Most existing skins should support this feature out of the box.

Search engine friendly file names

To give your beautiful albums maximal exposure, it's important that they are search engine friendly. Search engines like Google pay much attention to file names (so they told us), so if your "Hiking in the mountains" image in your "Vacation" album is called "IMG_1602.JPG", it won't match searches for "Hiking" and "Mountains" as good as files called "Hiking in the mountains.jpg" and "Hiking in the mountains.html".

By default jAlbum simply re-uses the original image file names for the generated images and html pages, but you can now tick the "Generate search engine friendly file names" checkbox under Advanced album settings->Naming to have jAlbum create more descriptive file names. jAlbum will now combine the name of the current image folder, the image title, description and keywords when it generates images and html pages.

Skin developers: You can create custom naming schemes by creating a custom "FileNamer" and passing it to the album engine by calling engine.setFileNamer().

Is there any downside with this feature, you may ask. Yes there is: jAlbum usually keeps track of generated files so that the corresponding generated files are removed from the album if you remove the original image. The same applies if you rename or move images within jAlbum, but with this feature switched on, this synchronization will currently not happen, so you may end up with more files in your album than you need. To clean things up, just remove the local album and remake it. Keeping this limitation in mind, I recommend to use this feature only when you're done with your album and simply wish to make it as easily found by search engines as possible.

Please give us your views on these changes! We're always happy hear what you think.

Wishing you all the best for 2012!

/David