This is the view mode jAlbum starts in. It shows whenever you don't have any album project open. Let's go through each part of jAlbum's main user interface:
- Sign in: Allows you to sign in to your jAlbum account. If you have purchased a license for jAlbum, the license will automatically be activated when you sign in. Once you are signed in, this button changes to a sign out button.
- Notification center: Notifies you when there is a new jAlbum update, skin update, when the account is about to expire and a lot of other things.
- Recent projects: A list of all your recent album projects, you can have 50 album projects in this list. The list can be sorted as recent, a-z or z-a. Click on a project to open it.
- Empty project: Clicking here will close the current album project and return you to this view mode, which allows you to create new album projects by just adding files to jAlbum.
- Add: Add images to a new album project by clicking add or drag and drop images or folders from the file system directly to jalbum.
- Skin and style
- Skin: The Skin selector is a drop down menu that allows you to select any of the installed skins (templates/themes) or, at the end of the list, install more skins from jAlbum.net. Skins bundled with jAlbum appear in regular weight font and skins installed by the user appear in bold. A bundled skin however will appear in bold once it has been updated, as updates go in to the users skins directory, not the program directory.
- Style: The style selector is a drop down menu that lets you change and preview the style of your album, if supported by the selected skin. The current style is indicated by a tick, the highlighted style is the target. The popup image, if one is supplied by the skin, is an example of how the target style looks.
- Skin settings: If you click the gearwheel the skin settings will open.
- Skin info: If click on the info symbol the skin information window will open.
- Settings button: Opens jAlbum settings. These settings are applied to the album project you are working with and is independent of the skin you use.