I’m truly excited about this release because we’ve been able to speed up jAlbum in many ways. How about this:
- 3.5x faster JPEG image loads
- 2.4x faster JPEG image saves
- 1.8x faster image scaling (Smooth – Standard)
- Up to 2.7x faster image tool processing (Brightness, Saturation and Gamma)
- Up to 1.7x faster page processing (Tiger skin, “slide pages” on)
- Faster user interface responsiveness
This post will outline how we’ve been able to achieve such dramatic improvements, but let me first reflect on why I’m extra excited about this:
It simply feels great to be able to deliver this extra value to many loyal users who are on an existing support & update plan. I mean, you didn’t expect to basically get software that’s twice as fast as the version you paid for, did you? I love to be able to bring such positive surprises :-). It’s the opposite of the “rotten” feeling I had when I once bought a brand new Nokia phone back in the early 2000s, only to realize two weeks later that Nokia had released a bunch of new models, and mine was already obsolete. Perhaps they delivered a bug fix or two, but that was about it. No new features, no improved performance. Just minimal maintenance :-(. I decided that if I ever produce products, I’d do the opposite. When Apple came on the scene, lo’ and behold, they committed to updating “old” iPhones for many years, not just minimal maintenance. That’s how to run a business! Happy users are good for business as well. If you’re on an existing support & update plan, jAlbum 37 is a free update. (For old users, we provide discounted extensions).
Faster JPEG loads and saves
jAlbum 37 loads and saves JPEG images significantly faster due to a native code library called “turbojpeg” that relies on super fast “SIMD” instructions. SIMD stands for Single Instruction Multiple Data and simply means that one instruction can operate on large data sets. This speeds up multimedia operations like JPEG loads and saves significantly. SIMD instructions are available on all modern CPUs today. We provide custom code for both Intel and arm architectures for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
There is one caveat: The current version of “turbojpeg” doesn’t embed exif metadata with images. If this is a “must-have”, untick the “turbojpeg” option under Preferences->Advanced->Image writers. I think most users will be fine with embedding EXIF information on the generated pages only. Other copyright information can still be embedded as xmp data.
Should you encounter any problems reading or writing JPEG images, let us know! You can always toggle various image readers and writers on and off under Preferences->Advanced with jAlbum 37 now.
Faster image pipeline
jAlbum is simply doing less unneeded work while processing images now, resulting in higher speed and lower RAM usage. The previous versions did too many “buffer cloning” operations and weren’t considered optimal use of the GPU (the graphics card processor).
Faster image tools
We’ve also speeded up several of jAlbum’s image tools so they utilize the GPU as much as possible. The Brightness, Saturation, and Gamma filters are now applied 2.7 times faster.
(Measured on a Mac M4. Exact performance improvement is depending on your graphics card)
Faster page processing
We now measure 1.7x performance improvement when building a huge 6000-image gallery using Tiger skin (slide pages generation on). This has been made possible by optimizing the Javascript engine’s handling of jAlbum variables (faster “scope” switching). The exact speed benefit varies between skins.
Faster user interface responsiveness
With v35.1, we ensured that folder tree triangles only showed in the folder navigation tree if there were subfolders as a service to the viewer. This had the unfortunate side effect of slowing down the UI when navigating slow devices, like NAS devices (networked drives), so in v37, we’re again painting folder triangles no matter if there are sub folders or not.
There’s more. Read about all the improvements in our release notes.
Enjoy jAlbum 37!