Whatever might happen around us, we never stop bringing new features to jAlbum and our bundled skins. 🙂 Most of these ideas came from our helpful community which is a tremendous help for us, the development team. Here are a few new things added recently:
Continuous zoom, zooming into the original image
When you aim to show the finest details in a photo the web-optimized slide images are often too small. With this new continuous zoom tool, the skin can load the high-resolution version on the fly when the visitor zooms enough into an image. However, loading a sizeable image (e.g. a 64 MB panorama image) can be hard for both the graphics system and also regarding the load time. So you might want to optimize (downsize) such images before you add them as “original”.
This function has been made available first in Story skin, but Photoblogger will follow soon. You can use the Ctrl + mouse wheel and Numpad + / – buttons too, besides the slider handle below the zoom button:
Skip between levels with previous/next folder links
Originally my skins only jumped to the next folder of the same level. Consequently, an automatic slideshow has always stopped the first time when it didn’t find an adjacent folder. Now the “Skip folder levels” option allows jumping levels up and down. This also happens when you go beyond the last image in a folder (in the lightbox), this way the slideshow won’t stop at the middle of a complex album.
Ask permission to enter a folder
If you’d like to showcase photos unsuitable for every audience, it’s good to have a popup asking the visitor to confirm his/her age. To make this happen all you have to do is add a variable, called askPersmission in Edit mode‘s right-side “Variables” panel. See below!
Select the folder → Edit mode → Variables panel
To customize these texts add a value right to the variable name. Format: TitleText::QuestionText::AllowButtonText::DisallowButtonText.
Of course, kids can click “I’m over 18“, but this is at least some sort of attempt to distract them. If you need to set up a strict policy, the only way is by adding password protection to folders through the server’s Control panel. A web page cannot provide any such protection from inside, because anybody can read the folder’s URL from the source code.
Better support for media files and practically any file format beyond JPG
As a starter, I always design my skins for regular JPGs – as that makes up 99% of the albums. However, jAlbum albums should be capable of handling videos, PDFs, moving GIFs, and such, which do not always work out-of-the-box, or at least don’t work optimally. To test different file formats and image types I set up a test album – you too can peek into:
Related: Using THM files for media (as poster image)
THM files were introduced in the early days of jAlbum to provide poster images for video files. Since jAlbum can transcode videos and extract thumbnails, this feature has become less important. Unless you’d like to use an external image, like a real movie poster, or a poster for an audio file, which is the only way to provide a visual representation for them. Just add a JPG file renamed using the same base name as the media file, but using the extension “thm” – e.g. sound.mp3 → sound.thm –, and place this file into the Image directory’s appropriate folder. Note, if the media file is linked (i.e. not copied directly into the Image directory) you still have to use the Image directory (Ctrl-Shift-I) – due to historical reasons – otherwise jAlbum will not pick up the THM file.
Related: Using sound clips
Sound clip support is a special feature of some skins (Tiger, Story, and Photoblogger for example) by which you can add sound to an otherwise silent photo or video. You should add the mp3 file named the same as the image or video but keep its original “mp3” extension. You need to place this file in the file’s original (linked) folder, otherwise, if it’s placed in the Image directory jAlbum will add it as a separate sound file.
In the case of videos, the sound clips play independently, although the skin tries to synchronize their start/stop events. Here is an example of such a video enhanced with a sound clip.
Many users ask why videos (or the background audio) won’t auto-start in their albums. The bad news is, that this is by design. Browser makers started blocking auto-starting videos (with sound) in 2019, to silence obtrusive ads. This means visitors must click the “Start/Play” button the first time, even though the gallery author turned on the “Start videos automatically” option. Once the visitor has started a video in the album, the next one will probably start automatically. The browser maintains the so-called “engagement index” to know which sites the visitor trusts. You can read more about this “feature” here.
Hiding GPS location
Showing off GPS location publicly might raise security concerns. For instance, I wanted to mask my flat’s location in the sample album. Unfortunately, mobile photos almost always have this GPS data embedded, so it’s not enough to trash it through the Edit mode’s Location panel alone. Hence there is a new setting in Story and Photoblogger skins in the “Image data” panel (above the mentioned Location panel) – called “Hide GPS location“. Using this you can avoid placing the GPS location of a photo on the album’s map.
… and one more thing
We are aware of how popular our Chameleon was. Unfortunately, Chameleon skin was based on the – since outdated – “table design”, which has rendered further development practically impossible. Now – due to massive demand 😉 – I decided to rewrite Chameleon from the ground to make it modern and responsive. It’ll take a few months, but hopefully, you’ll appreciate the effort.
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