Here is a feature that would be very helpful to me. If I shoot a large event with several hundred photos, some people may only want to download 10 or 15 pictures but downloading individually is inefficient. They have no interested in the other images so I'd suggest adding a "Download Selected" option. This would be my vision:

1) Add a checkbox to the thumbnail so multiple images could be selected
2) Add a new button named "Download Selected" next to the "Download All" option in the sidebar.
3) Dynamically build a new zip file containing only the selected images. You'd probably need to distribute a simple zip app embedded in the album if people select this feature.

Thanks for considering it!

Tom

This feature would be a candidate for a server side API that takes links to individual images and returns a zip of them.

I know, such a feature would create a dependency on jalbum.net - something we generally want to avoid.

Well, no, and the reason is fairly straightforward - this would require server-side processing, and jAlbum is not a server-side application.

To honor a visitor's request for a bundle of the selected images, that request would have to be sent to the server. The server would then have to access the requested files and assemble a download package. This is something that can't be done in a browser - the selection and bundling of the files has to be done on the server.

This is totally at odds with the jAlbum application model. It's not a server-side application. It doesn't maintain a database of images on the server, then put together albums or download packages "on the fly." It's not a content management system.

It's easy to separate them if you remember one thing: the jAlbum core doesn't produce a single line of HTML, CSS, or Javascript on its own. That's what a skin does.

The jAlbum core organizes the projects, processes the images and videos, and provides the programming tools. The skins actually produce the album pages, using all of the things that the core makes available. The core then provides things like the uploading module, the routines for previewing the album locally, and so on.

In the settings panels, if a setting appears on the skin's own panels (Tiger, Neptune, whatever), it's a skin setting. If a setting appears elsewhere (General, Pages, Images, etc.), it's the jAlbum core that handles it.

There are some places where the lines blur a bit, but that's the basic "division of labor."


The zip file is created when you build the album. It is then uploaded to the server, along with the album pages, and is sitting there ready to be downloaded on demand. But once that file is created on your PC, that's the end of the process. It can't be customized later, in response to something a particular visitor wants.