jAlbum 33.2 has a few new APIs tailored to help skin developers:

• Skin developers can now add an "earlyinit" file that will be called at an earlier stage of album builds than "init". This allows skins to filter-out file types and categories that aren't supported.
• New classes " CategoryFilter ", " RejectCounterFilter " to support rejecting/ignoring certain file types
• The Paginator class now supports including/excluding distinct file types as well as categories

Examples speak louder than words. See the attached "MinimalTest" and its "earlyinit.bsh" and "init.bsh" files. This modifiation to Minimal is set to ignore PDF files, PNG files and any audio files, just to demonstrate this mechanism. If any such files are found within the project, they are ignored, and a warning notification pops up during the album build.

Let's focus on the most important parts of "earlyinit.bsh" and "init.bsh" here:

earylinit.bsh:

import se.datadosen.jalbum.*;
 
/**
 * Demo of how to exclude certain (supposedly not supported) file types from the gallery
 * In this demo we're excluding PDF, PNG and audio files
 * This also demos how to count the number of unsupported (rejected) files
 * In init.bsh, jAlbum has already done the counting, and the result is presented to the user
 * as a notification, in case files has been rejected.
 */
CategoryFilter categoryFilter = new CategoryFilter().exclude("pdf", "png").exclude(Category.audio);
rejectCounter = new RejectCounterFilter(categoryFilter);
 
/**
 * Install filter chain inside the engine's album object factory
 */
factory.setFilter(rejectCounter);

init.bsh:

/**
 * Before calling init.bsh here, jAlbum has counted the number of objects in the gallery
 * Prior to calling init.bsh, jAlbum has called earlyinit.bsh, where a filter
 * and counter for unsupported file types was set up (rejectCounter).
 * That counter can now be checked here, and user warned
 */
if (rejectCounter.getTotalCount() > 0) {
	System.out.println("Skipped types: " + rejectCounter);
	engine.fireWarning("PDF, PNG and audio files are not supported and have been skipped");
}

The CategoryFilter works in the same manner as the Paginator. Just chain calls to specify what files to include/exclude. To "simply" ignore PDF files and assuming that you don't care about informing the user about that, just put the following within earlyinit.bsh (or .js or .groovy):

factory.setFilter(new CategoryFilter().exclude("pdf"));

Let's assume that your skin only supports images, videos and the "PDF" "other" type but no folder support. Here's how to set that up:

factory.setFilter(new CategoryFilter().include(Category.image, Category.video).include("pdf"));

Here's a skin that supports everything but folders:

factory.setFilter(new CategoryFilter().exclude(Category.folder));

... or even shorter:

factory.setFilter(new CategoryFilter().nodirs();

The following variables ONLY are available in earlyinit:
engine, albumEngine, ctx, window, window, context, factory, root

Works well, tried changing skins and back, all ok.

It might be with updating the alert to say the objects are not supported by the 'skin name'. Just so some users don't think jAlbum doesn't support them.

Now that we have earlyinit.groovy, when do we get latefinally.groovy? For symmetry.

Great that you like it . I shall look into the GIF issue pretty soon now. You're basically saying that we can simply "use original" for GIF files. I think that's reasonable.

BTW, an interesting side-note. The WebP format allows for animation. I converted some of my animated GIF's to WebP (using an online converter), and the file sizes drop by about 50%, with no visible loss of image quality.

No way for the core or a skin to take care of that however. We can't do the conversion (AFAIK), and if the user adds an animated WebP to a project, we can't detect that it's animated, and should not be scaled. The user would still have to manually mark it as "use original."

ETA: There are ways to figure out if a WebP image is animated, but talk about adding a lot of overhead to the app! Yikes.

Like this cat, I think you've nailed it.




Guess which other skins have never been affected by this bug.

My only complaint about the new "exclusion" and "GIF" routines is that I'll have to specify the minimum jAlbum version for my skins as 33.2.1. Aesthetically unpleasing. Less objectionable would be 33.3. Even better, 34.

But that's just a representing thumbnail, right? Thumbnails need to be converted. This change is about only the slide images.

None of mine, either. I don't think any of Laza's skins commit that sin.

I think it's probably safe to overlook this "gap" in the implementation.