See this
example of a set of albums which all use the same thumbnails and slide images.
This is a multi-language gallery, where the same images are used, but there are separate HTML pages for each of five languages.
I.E., separate HTML pages are used, but the slide images and thumbnail images are not duplicated.
The same technique can be used for projects which are not based on language differences, but different selections from a basic set of images, or different sorting sequences.
One limitation is that if there is a hierarchy of sub-folders, the same hierarchy will apply to each set of albums.
Each language (or album set) is treated as a separate project.
To do this, you need to use the same "Output directory" for every album project.
Obviously you will need to ensure unique names for the HTML pages, and you can do this by setting a different "page extension" for each project in Settings>Advanced>Naming.
For this example I have used "_en.html" for the English language version, "_de.html" for the German language et cetera.
Each language has its own html page, but they all access the same images for slides and thumbnails, so you don't have to upload the same images five times.
After the pages for the first project have been created, you can use "Make album/Changes" for the other projects, as the thumbnails and scaled-down images do not have to be re-made.
The example was done with a slightly modified BluPlusPlus skin, but the method can be used with most skins. Chameleon skin now includes this as a built-in "multi-language" feature which can be implemented from the user interface.
Method
Keep a separate project file (xxx.jap) for each language.
Make a separate "Image directory" for each project. After dragging the images into the Jalbum Edit window for the first project, you can just copy the albumfiles.txt file into the "Image directories" for each of the other projects. Now you can specify different "exclusion sets" for each project, and each project can have its own comments for each picture.
Allternatively, you could set the different language *.jap project files to pick up the comments from a different source.
e.g. English comments from Iptc.Caption/Abstract, German Commment from text file. (Settings>Advanced>Metadata allows you to select one of five different sources for comments).
Although this example uses all of the images in each album, you can use JAlbum's "include/exclude" option to vary the content of each project.
In Settings>Advanced>Naming, change "Page extension" to "_de" for the German language version and "_en" for the English version and so on for other languages (or projects). If you like, you can leave one of them as the default ".html".
And Selecting "Preferences" from the Tools menu will allow you to set a different language each project (for navigation etcetera).
