And now all newly-created groups are turning up empty, or missing entirely.

Sorry, David, but this is just an unholy mess, and I won't spend any more time on it. I'll check back in a week or so.

Nope. I don't even have Java 8 on the machine right now.

This started happening with 35b5 (and b6 is nowhere to be found). When I try to create a group using an existing folder at C:\Documents\Atom\Atom Demos, and I select that folder, I end up with a group a level down, at C:\Documents\Atom\Atom Demos\New Group. If, instead, I try to name it Atom Demos when I create it, I end up with C:\Documents\Atom\Atom Demos\Atom Demos, which is still not right. And of course, since that's a newly-created empty directory, nothing works. Since it's buried somewhere in the registry, I can't even manually straighten it out.

The only way to get it to work is to select C:\Documents\Atom, but manually name the group Atom Demos. Counter-intuitive, to say the least,, since there's already a directory with that name. I should be able to select it - I shouldn't have to type in the name.

If I'm struggling with this, what do you think is going to happen to the average user?

This is just a UX mistake, but I think that using the Windows registry for this is the fatal mistake. It makes jAlbum utterly non-portable. You can't copy your configuration to another machine, and you can't back up your configuration.

Finally, a Java update wipes out all the information. True, most users don't need to install Java at all, but if it's on your machine, it automatically prompts you to do updates. And a lot of older Windows installs have Java lurking on them. It stays there unless you actively remove it.

Project group alpha sorting is case-sensitive, but project alpha sorting is not.

It works OK for me with b6

If you remove a project set from the list there is no current way of getting it back, short of deleing it and starting again or creating a 'new' project selecting the folder and deleting the default 'New Group' entry.

Ok, I'll use an ordinary "project-groups.txt" file as backing storage for root-level project groups. I'll also fix the UX behaviour when creating new groups.

Much improved.

But there are a couple of issues that are still troublesome. First, take a look at the attached screenshot of the file structure, showing where I have the project that creates the top level of my skin demo site. In short, C:\Documents\jAlbum Skin Development\Site.

No matter what I do, I can't create a new group called Site that contains just this one project. If I point to this directory when creating the group, it comes up empty. See screenshot, with hovering showing the location of the group. And then, with an empty group, I can't drag this project into it from Recent Projects. Treat me like an idiot - tell me, step-by-step, how to achieve this result.

The second problem is a more generalized version of the same thing. I can create a new, empty group, but there doesn't seem to be any way to drag projects into it unless they're already in My Albums (renamed, in my case). The only place those projects are showing in the project list is in Recent Projects, but I can't drag projects from there. It would appear that I need to move projects into groups in File Manager, then create the group within jAlbum. That seems clunky.

B7, open the project gallery view. Change the location to one that has no sub-projects, the displayed projects shows a project from the previous location. See attached, location was set to My Albums and changed to Archived. The forum images project is under My Albums.