jAlbum/Settings/Advanced

General

Advanced - General Settings controls what pages get processed and how they are encoded.

1. 1. Encoding: Sets the character encoding from a drop down menu, with a wide range of choices. HTML2 to HTM4 the recommended standard was ISO-8859-1, it can represent 156 characters, some of which are international characters.
2. Write UTF-8: Checking this box will ensure that UTF-8 (UTF is the Unicode Transformation Format) is always used for character encoding. UTF-8 is the current standard recommended for HTML documents, jAlbum also recommends UTF-8. What does it actually do? It allows you to display different languages correctly, a Greek Delta ‘Δ’ for example, is represent by Δ
3. Date format: Date formats may be displayed within your album as the current date, as part of any metadata for photographs, such as date taken or elsewhere, depending on the skin you are using. If this field is left blank the default standard date format for your region will be used, if you want a specific format enter valid letter codes here. Examples of valid letter codes are shown in the table to the right. You enter the letter codes in the form of, for example: h:mma E dd MMM yyyy’. In this case you would see, for example, 12:24AM 14 Jul 2014. The letters used are from the Simple Date Format, the ones shown in the table to the right are commonly used, others are D, F, k, K, s, S, u, w, W, X and Z.
   
4. Ignore pattern: You can automatically exclude files and folders by entering their names or regular expressions, this saves having to individually exclude items. Regular expressions can be used to exclude multiple files, for example folderName.* would exclude folderName1, folderName2, folderName3 etc. \..* will ignore all files and folders that start with a (a period character, usually used to make a file invisible to the user.). You can find out more on regular expressions (often abbreviated to regex or regexp) by searching the internet for one of those terms.
5. Chain directories: Enable sequential navigation between index and slide pages from different folders by linking the last page of one folder to the first page of the next folder.
6. Process subdirectories: If this option is not checked then subdirectories in your project will not be processed. This is very useful if you have a main project that includes several sub-projects (often called a Master Project/Album). You process all of your subdirectories with this option enabled, but for the top level master project the setting is turned off. The master album thus has links to the sub albums, but does not affect them, so you can use different style/settings in your sub-projects.
7. Process only updated subdirectories: If your project has many levels of folders and subfolders, and lots of files in your project, then turning this option off can save processing time. It works by comparing file dates for your input and output directories and only processes those in the images directory that are newer than the equivalent in the output directory. It is best left turned off, for general use, and used only when working on large projects and turning it on specifically for a particular build. It can give confusing results, when turned on, if other settings are also changed, like changing the skin.
8. Include subdirectories in index pages: Normally this option would be turned on. If it is turned off then there will be no navigation links to the subfolders. It is useful if you have your own website and, for example, you have password protected access to individual subfolders. Users logging in to one folder would not know of the existence of another folder as there would be no links between the two.
9. Use thumbnail for folder icon: With this option off subfolders are indicated by a folder icon, see figure 10.3, on index pages. Turned on and you can select an image within each folder to act as the thumbnail icon for that folder. Some skins can indicate a folder of images by having a thumbnail image with a folder icon overlay.
10. Exclude new images by default: Before version 6 of jAlbum, items that were not listed in a folder’s albumfiles.txt file were ignored, so adding images to an existing folder did not result in them being added to the project. From version 6 any file added to a folder is automatically included, unless this option is enabled. Excluded files are listed in albumfiles.txt with a dash (-) prefix, making the selection of a few images from a bunch of new ones easier to manage.

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