It’s been almost a year since jAlbum 37 was released, which has more than doubled the speed of many operations. We won’t disappoint you this time either. jAlbum 38 focuses on bringing more viewers and views to your galleries. The idea is simple: the easier it is for viewers to navigate a gallery in the way they want, the more views they receive.
We call this concept “Views” by the way, as it offers multiple ways to view and navigate your images. jAlbum is already good at presenting vast amounts of images in a structured manner. Still, you’ve been limited to choosing one structure – folders with names corresponding to your travels, for instance. You can now offer viewers the ability to view and navigate your gallery by date, theme, and country, among other options.
It’s time for an example, cause nothing beats an example. I’ve put together a “Memories” gallery of pictures and videos from the past decade that bring back memories. You’ll notice that you can view this gallery in 15 different ways through the various folders and menus offered:
- Top rated
- By year
- Places
- Food
- Sports
- Projects
- Recently added
- Macro lens
- Nikon shots
- Portrait images
- Summer time
- Winter time
- Videos
- Panoramics
- Animals
If you find any of these sample views an attractive addition to your gallery, then jAlbum 38 is for you! The best thing is that jAlbum automatically maintains the views for you, based on the criteria you set up. Just add images to your main gallery, and the views will be populated accordingly. To create a view, right-click on jAlbum’s Explorer panel and select “New view”. For details, see our documentation.
The second best thing: Views works with all skins. You heard it, you can use your favourite skin with views!
A View doesn’t need to source itself from the whole gallery. It’s sourced from the folder it was created in and can then be moved to other subfolders. That’s what I did with the “Other views” in the “Memories gallery above.
jAlbum also allows you to code your own criteria using scripts in the Groovy language. The possibilities are literally endless. We hope you will want to contribute your best views by posting to our forum. Here’s, for instance, the rule for “Top rated”, i.e., objects with a rating of 4 or above: obj.rating >= 4
By default, views don’t “see” into hidden folders, but this behavior can be toggled under Settings -> Advanced -> General. We’ve enabled this option for those using “Structures” today and want to migrate to “Views”.
Internal linking
The third best thing: Adding views won’t significantly affect gallery size (typically 1-6%). This is achieved by cross-referencing the same set of images from multiple folders. We refer to it as “internal linking.” Internal linking is supported by many modern skins, including Plain, Tiger, PhotoBlogger, Story, Lizard, and Minimal, as well as third-party skins like Atom, Jupiter, Mercury, Neptune, Opus 16, and Saturn.
“Internal linking” can significantly reduce the build time and final size of view-based galleries. Here’s a comparison of the same gallery with and without “internal linking”. This time using Plain skin:
Memories (internal links). Make time: 2 min, 44s. Gallery size: 762 MB
Memories (without internal links). Make time: 12min, 32s. Gallery size: 3.44GB
Our skin repository now allows you to filter for skins that support internal linking. See “Album Settings – Advanced – General – Use internal linking” for how to toggle internal linking on and off (should it cause any trouble).
The primary purpose of internal linking is to support Views, but you can also create internal links within a project manually. Just copy and paste objects, choosing “Link” when pasting. You can alternatively use the qualifier keys your OS requires during drag-and-drop to create links.
Attachments
In jAlbum 28, we added Audio Clips, allowing users to attach and record audio clips to objects. With v38, we’ve made this concept more general, allowing images to be attached as well. It’s now called Attachments, referring to attachments to emails. For non-image objects, such as PDF documents, attachments provide an easy way to display a more engaging image that represents the document until it’s opened. Attachments also offer a natural way to select a suitable representing image for a view, for instance. .
You can even attach images to a folder, even though folders already have a mechanism for this. You currently can’t attach images to pages, but we’ll get there. By the way, attachments already work with most skins.
To attach/detach audio clips and representing images, right-click an object within jAlbum’s Explore view and select the Attachments sub menu.
New Apache upload engine
jAlbum has been using two different third-party FTP engines under the hood to cater to the various needs and quirks of FTP servers. It’s always been our goal that uploading with jAlbum should work (if not better) wherever uploading using, say, FileZilla works (a great FTP client software, by the way). Lately, however, we’ve encountered cases where both of the FTP engines we use have failed, and it turns out that these engines (edtFTPj and ftp4j) are no longer being maintained. We’ve therefore added the “Apache Commons Net” FTP engine to jAlbum. This is a popular, robust, and well-maintained open-source FTP server (according to AI). We highly recommend that you switch to it, as we plan to phase out the older engines in the future. To make the switch, choose Tools->Upload/Manage and change the “Type” under your current account profile to any of the new “Apache” based types. Whenever possible, use the encrypted “TLS/SSL” alternatives, as they’re more secure.
Apart from being popular, robust, and well-maintained, our tests have also shown the Apache Commons Net engine to be somewhat faster: we measured a 10% speedier upload speed when uploading the “Sample Project”.
jAlbum’s own hosting uses the robust, fast, and secure SFTP protocol, and isn’t affected by the new Apache engine. If you’re already using our hosting or SFTP, no changes are required. If your FTP host supports it, we recommend using SFTP.
Summary
jAlbum 38 brings more improvements and bug fixes, but the highlight should be that it opens up for greater galleries by allowing several ways to view and navigate them. Without impacting the gallery size as well. We hope you’re as fired up about v38 as we are.
Download jAlbum 38 today! jAlbum 38 is a free update for anyone on a current support & update plan. Check the license badge under ‘Help’ or sign in to your profile page at jalbum.net to view your status.