You CAN let jAlbum copy the full folder structure, but use hard links in the copies. That way the copies don't consume any extra disk space (apart from one inode for each "copy" pointing to the same data). See Preferences->Use hard links.

If you're concerned that the album structure should, at all times mirror the structure on disk, then I recommend the "Use folder" option, where jAlbum is pointed to your original image structure. Yes, this has the side effect that if you delete an image within jAlbum, then it's physically deleted from your disk as well. To reduce such consequences, use backups.

I'm exploring whether to add a "Refresh" option to the "Mirror content" mechanism so you can force jAlbum to recreate the a mirrored folder structure by means of links at any given time. To support this, jAlbum would only need to keep track of the target folder of the root of such a mirrored tree.

Some form of “Refresh” would be ideal. My solution has been to delete all the subfolders from 2023, and re-add them. This negates the “NEW” marker I have in Photoblogger, since not all the sub-folders are updated. In an ideal world, I might have:

UniversalStudios2023
—MinionLand
—NewYork
—FifteenDollarBeerCart

If I make a second visit in 2023, and add new photos of the FifteenDollarBeerCart, it would be nice if marked just that folder as “NEW”. But, this “NEW” is also new to me, and I don’t know if it means “new since the last time the album was built” or “added in the past X days.” If it is based on “past X days” I suppose it wouldn’t matter.

Another challenge is after several visits, I may find I now have enough photos of something for it to move to its own sub-folder. As I am adding new photos, I might go through them and make new subfolders and moving things there. But Jalbum (with mirror) is locked in time, and those changes - moved photos, new folder - do not show up.

Some manner of “Refresh all the items in the top of this JAlbum, and their subfolders” would suffice — if technically easy to do.

When I first shared photos in 1996, I put them on an FTP server on my PC and would dial in to the ISP at night and let folks connect to my machine. Over the years, I have had several different tools for the album - from DOS tools that made an HTML thumbnail page of photos in a directory, then a different tool to link all the HTML links in to a page, to various things I wrote myself. When Mac OS X was new, a company had a super cool photo gallery, but eventually my folders were too large and it broke. Jalbum has outlasted them all, and any issues found over the years were all resolved. Such a great tool.

It just takes a different approach to all the ones I used. They would just scan an images folder, and generate thumbnails and HTML based on it. No need to copy anything, unless they had an option to “include full size” in which case that would get copied over to the HTML gallery. That makes sense.

I think I need to get over my confusion with mirror, link, use folder (new one to me), etc.

Perhaps you should start thinking about curating your material.

Even in the film era, the best photographer wasn't the one who cranked out the most prints - the best photographer was the one who selected the choicest material, and tossed the rest into the bin. In the digital era, that's become even more true.

Heh, I should have just said “isn’t that kinda like telling someone who brings their car in to the shop they should just drive it less?” ;-P

Hi Allen, the more I think about it, the "Use folder" option should be what you need. See https://jalbum.net/help/en/Managing_images_with_jAlbum

Question — the original way I did it put tons of control files in my photo gallery. I also found this caused problems if I wanted to take just some of my photos and use them in a different gallery. For example, I might have a massive “Disneyland” gallery with photos going back to 1996, but decide I want to publish a special “Disneyland’s 50th Anniversary” gallery with just those folders. It would use all the settings from the big gallery, since those were the .jalbum (or whatever files) from that.

I also have lost so many photos of the year due to file system corruption — I had everything backed up to TWO different DROBOS (today, a Synology NAS with dual drive redundancy) and that’s great for hard drive failures, but doesn’t do a darned thing about a file system getting screwed up. I could make a disk image of my library, and make it read-only to prevent anything from getting screwed up, but that original jalbum wouldn’t like that.

That will be the first thing that bites me, after a decade+ of "deleting" things out of JAlbum having no effect on my master files.

I have another batch of 2500 photos to add from a recent trip, so I'll be going through these posts and doing some experimenting.

And my photos live off-site, on a NAS with dual drive redundancy, and three pocket hard drives. I've had too many hard drives "just die" over the years