jAlbum 30 is here!

Jay! We’ve just released jAlbum v30! This release has four highlights that we’ll cover in this blog post:

• New “Pixelate region” image tool
• Faster and better WebP processing
• Faster metadata processing
• Significant improvements to Tiger and Story skins

Excited to know more? Let’s go!

Pixelate region tool

Web galleries are public in nature, but sometimes you find yourself needing to protect the identity of an individual, or a car registration plate for instance. Historically this has had to be done using an external editor, but now you can easily “pixelate” regions of images from within jAlbum. jAlbum never touches your originals, so if you later wish to remove a “pixelation”, that can be done as well. Here’s an example of this tool in effect:

Just open an image for editing in jAlbum, then select the “Pixelate region” tool from the “Image tools” menu.

Now just go ahead and paint blocky pixels over regions that need protection. Use the “Pixel size” slider to adjust the size of pixels to your liking. The left mouse button plants pixels and the right mouse button restores that area again. You can also hit the “Clear” button to remove all “pixels”.

Faster and better WebP processing

jAlbum is using the excellent “TwelveMonkey’s” image processing library for most image formats. v30 is fitted with a major update to this library (3.9.4), improving performance and robustness. Most notably, WebP processing has been improved, now reading images 27% faster and supporting transparency and non-lossy WebP images as well.

Faster metadata processing

jAlbum now caches camera dates, thereby significantly improving speed in operations where camera dates are involved. This is most notable when ordering images by camera date. Prior to v30, jAlbum had to open each image and retrieve the camera date from within the EXIF section. On slower IO devices, like networked drives, this has caused huge delays when opening projects, folders, or making albums. Now, camera dates are cached inside jAlbum’s “.jalbum/albumfiles.txt” file, reducing the workload of grabbing camera dates to a fraction:

A “typical” network-mounted project of 350 images previously needed 21 seconds to order the images by camera date. Now the ordering is done in a split second. The album build time went down from a minute to 16 seconds.

Improvements to Tiger and Story

This is actually what I’m most excited about: Tiger and Story skins now behave even more naturally on mobile devices and they show more of YOUR images, and less user interface “clutter”. Just click or tap once on an image to hide all controls. Another click/tap will reveal the controls again. Double-click/tap to zoom in. This is actually how the image library of both Android and iOS devices behave. Why should a web gallery behave differently? With Story skin, you’ll see even more of your images as the controls are overlaid instead of pushing the image down. When viewing images on a horizontally held phone, this makes a huge difference to the image size. Check out this updated gallery, especially on your Android or iOS device.

To summarize:

• Single-clicking toggles UI controls on/off
• Double-clicking zooms in/out
• Pinch to zoom in/out gradually (mobile devices only)
  
• Swipe to move back and forth between images
• Swipe in a zoomed-in image to pan

Simply put, this is a much better end-user experience as it is the behavior users are accustomed to already. I advise you to remake and re-upload your Tiger and Story galleries so this new behavior kicks in.

(Yes, there are options to revert to the old click behavior if you prefer that)

There’s more: These skins have a new thumbnail layout option that allows for thumbnails of various heights. Check out “Patchwork” for Story skin in this sample gallery: