Hi, about a year ago we started to use jAlbum as a means to generate a 'Museum' of 'Collections'. Mostly classic audio and test equipment with items represented by a 'HauptBild', a uniquely named jpg image. Each collection is an individual album with up to a few thousand items, an Album-of-Albums ties it all together into the 'Museum'. This is the third iteration of attempting to have this kind of functionality over about 25 years of collecting, previous versions were obsoleted due to operating system changes or cost.

A lot of effort went into generating a 'data source': a file structure in windows for each collection, manufacturer, model, support documents, internet-shortcuts, knowledge base articles and repair/service notes. Each item in a collection has information in the 'database': an excel sheet with tabs for each collection and about 25 columns of information including UniqueID, specs, keywords, descriptions etc.

From our past experience we wanted as little 'customization' (ie edits within jAlbum) as possible - all should be defined by the datasource and database plus some processing rules in an external tool. The datasource changes constantly: new items added, information added/corrected, so the album should update without manual editing within jAlbum.

We decided for PhotoBlogger skin and developed a script, which writes the database values to specific IPTC tags of the 'HauptBild' to be read into user vars in jAlbum which are then available in the PhotoData box. Laza and Dave gave advice and helped with developing external tools to realize this.

This year produced a lot of insight and a list of requests scribbled on notepads - I will post those as I go through the list. The process took so long because we moved and the collections are in storage until a nice place to display them is completed in the new location. But this move provided the basis for an inventory and completing the datasouce files.

There is a new effort underway to write code to include indexed sorting and reading the database directly into user vars, but that's still experimental for now.

Another option would be expanding jAlbum's 'database import' function to include user variables and assigning those to csv headers, or better even xlsx sheet headers.

jAlbum is fun to use, produces superb web pages - let's make sure it is available for decades, thanks!

Wolf.

Hello David,
currently the site is password protected for our own use - I will share links as soon as I have a chance to remove some content (looking into copyright for some of the scanned documents).

In the mean time I'll start a thread in 'requests' for features which would help for an application like this and possibly others?

Wolfgang