I was helping a user with his custom skin, and stumbled on something interesting. If a skin doesn't indicate that it supports internal linking, you can still generate views. They work, but of course, they crank out their own thumbnails and slide images. But in the process, they also lose some of their jAlbum metadata, like comments. And when that happens, there's no way to add things like comments to view objects.

I think that if a skin doesn't support internal linking, the New view context menu should be disabled. Views still "work," but very badly.

It does appear that things like comments are now traveling with objects, even if the skin doesn't support internal linking.

But that all raises another issue. There are a number of skins that are not tagged as supporting internal linking, but in my quick tests, they actually do. Two quick examples, Split and Zigzag, which don't appear to have any difficulty with internal linking.

I'll wager that almost all skins can support internal linking, needing only a skin.properties tweak. As long as a skin is using the standard jAlbum pathnames, it should be fine.

The few that don't support internal linking also don't support folders, like Triton, or have their own unique structure requirements, like Venus (no images in the root, and only one layer of folders allowed). I've got betas of those two with improved detection and warning messages (they abort the album build if they run into a forbidden structure). For those, it would be nice to be able to disable view creation entirely, but it's not critical - a user would make the mistake only once.

And NoPages is the opposite. That skin doesn't produce any web pages - it's sole purpose is to process images and videos. So, internal links make no sense whatsoever.

But you can, for example, feed it a hodgepodge of images scattered over multiple folders. You can then add an alphabetical view to the project, hit Make album, and fetch the processed slide images, all neatly laid out in alphabetical folders - A, B, C, etc. It's like a coin sorter - dump your jar of loose change into it, and retrieve neat groups of pennies, nickels, dimes, etc.

Again, rather a strange use-case, but workable.

In fact, it can handle a Recently added view, since that doesn't produce any nested folders. Next release will allow that one, but disable the others.

Did some quick checking with a simple project with a folder of linked objects and an alphabetical view. These skins are not tagged as having support for internal linking, but they appear to work without any issues if I add the line in skin.properties for it.

• Hydrogen
• Lucid
• Minimal
• Reflections
• Responsive
• Split
• ZIgzag

The other skins that indicate that they don't support internal linking misbehave in various ways if they encounter internal links, views, or both. The specific type of failure varies, as one might imagine.

• Animatics
• Classic Aligned 2
• Missive
• NoPages (views work, but internal linking would be pointless)
• Triton (irrelevant, as it doesn't support folders at all)

Edited by: JeffTucker on 25 Nov 2025, 08:05 - updated list

Double check my testing before you do. My tests were very quick!

For the third-party skins, it's up to their developers, though there's nothing stopping a user from using a text editor to carry out a little self-help.