jAlbum 34 is here

jAlbum 34 is here. With improved ordering, navigation, and Multi Maker, this release focuses on the needs of power users who maintain large galleries and many projects. Here’s all you need to know:

Many of our users maintain many or large galleries with thousands of images and hundreds of folders. jAlbum is appreciated by both collectors, and nature photographers for making product presentations. For these purposes, a gallery can easily exceed 10.000 images in size. jAlbum 34 will be a welcome update for everyone, but especially for those of you who need to manage large image volumes or many projects. The improvements boils down to improved ordering, navigation, and an improved Multi Maker. As always, you can read about all the improvements in our release notes:

Improved ordering

Initially, a jAlbum gallery would maintain one image ordering, for instance “camera date” or “name” ordering (see Settings → Pages → Image ordering). Later on, we added the ability to keep each folder ordered according to your desires (See View menu → “Order by” and View menu → “Order folders by”). We now allow selected objects within a folder to be ordered as you please. See right-click context menu → “Order selected by”. Unlike the earlier ordering options, this new ordering isn’t managed automatically if you add new objects to the folder (this is a kind of “Custom” ordering). To get them ordered correctly, select the relevant objects (or all) and then issue “Order selected by” again. The earlier folder-specific ordering options now reside under the sub-menus “Ordering” and “Folder ordering” to reflect that they maintain the set ordering. You can order both continuous and non-continuous groups of objects. If you’re not happy with the ordering you just issued, just hit undo.

We’ve also added a new “file type” ordering. (The earlier “Type” ordering was actually a “Category” ordering, and has now been correctly labeled so). Objects can now be ordered according to folders first, name, last modified date, camera date, date added, rating, title, comment, category, type and shuffled.

Hint: If you need to order selected objects repeatedly, use CTRL+L as a keyboard shortcut. This calls the last used tool again.

 

Select-as-you-type navigation

jAlbum’s Explore view got its name from Windows Explorer. (Not the Internet Explorer, but the file Explorer). The ambition has always been that jAlbum should mimic the behavior of your computer’s file manager so you don’t have to re-learn how to, for instance, select, move, copy, and rename files or create folders.

Windows Explorer and OS X Finder have a clever select-as-you-type mechanism that we’ve now added to jAlbum as well. Select-as-you-type allows you to quickly locate and select a project, file, or folder by name. Just type the first few letters of a file- or folder name and jAlbum will take you to it. You can also hit one key repeatedly to rotate between all objects where the initial character matches.

Sounds complicated? Well, it isn’t. Just try it out :-). Select-as-you-type has been added to jAlbum’s Explorer, to the Multi Maker, Project Gallery, and Backup & Restore tools.

Note: To avoid key collision with rating and flagging objects. You now use SHIFT+keys 0-9 to rate and flag.

History navigation

The file manager of your operating system also keeps track of visited folders and allows you to navigate back and forward in a browser-like fashion. This has now been added to jAlbum as well. Just use the context menus’ “Backward” and “Forward” items or use ALT-Left and ALT-Right. If your mouse supports a “back” button, it now also serves as a shortcut to navigate backward.

Improved Multi Maker

Would you like to change skin, style, or settings for multiple projects easily? This can now be done with the Multi Maker of jAlbum 34. Just select the target projects, then right-click and select “Apply current settings“. The current jAlbum settings will now be applied (and saved) to all selected projects in one go.

The Multi Maker can now also manage multiple projects stored under various locations. Just drop the folder containing jAlbum projects onto the Multi Maker or select the desired projects folder from the “Location” selector.

There’s more. Read about all the improvements in our release notes.