jAlbum/Settings/Advanced

General

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

Encoding

Sets the character encoding used for reading and writing text. A commonly used setting in western Europe is ISO-8859-1, it can represent 256 characters, some of which are international characters. Nowadays we're moving more and more towards UTF-8 which can handle any possible languages/characters

Write UTF-8

Checking this box will ensure that UTF-8 (UTF is the Unicode Transformation Format) is always used for writing text. UTF-8 is the current standard recommended for HTML documents as it manages any possible signs and characters.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 on 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.

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.

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.

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.

Metadata

Advanced - Metadata Settings Comments, or captions, can be from a wide range of sources, not just what can be typed in when editing items. jAlbum will use the first source it finds from those selected.

1. xmp: xmp stands for ‘Extensible Metadata Platform’, it enables the creation, processing and interchange of metadata. If enabled description field metadata from the file itself will be used for the jAlbum caption.
2. jAlbum (Text file): Caption information can be read from a text file that has the same name, and is in the same folder, as the target file. For example an image called poppy.jpg could have its caption text in a file called poppy.txt.
3. JPEG: Looks for a caption metadata embedded within the image file.
4. IPTC caption: IPTC stands for ‘International Press and Telecommunications Council’ and they developed their own metadata format. (xmp is open source but was created by Adobe.)
5. EXIF User: Exif stands for ‘Exchangeable Image file Format’ and is a standard for formatting various media files. This is yet another means of embedding metadata in files.
6. EXIF Image Desc.: By now you will have checked all of the boxes , unchecked all of the boxes, or you know where your data is and exactly which option(s) to go for.
7. Title Source: You can select Object Name, Headline, or None! If you are not sure, go for none!
8. Include photographic data in generated pages: This option allows skins to show camera settings such as ISO, aperture, speed, flash fired status etc. Not all skins will show such information and the information shown may vary for those skins that do.
9. Include photographic data in generated images:
   
   This option writes the data from 8 above to the generated images in your album output. Turning on this option will result in a warning about possible image distortion and increased file sizes. See figure to the right.
   
10. Include xmp metadata in generated images: Writes the xmp metadata to the scaled-down (closeups) and, if included, hi-res images. This, with hi-res images, can save your images, comments and titles on the internet, just in case your backups fail. (You have got backups of your files, haven’t you?)
11. Include jAlbum widget support: This option must be enabled before deciding which widgets you want to use. The widgets are configured in Settings/Widgets.
12. Suppress Internet Explorer warnings: Internet Explorer will interfere in the viewing of local albums that use javaScript (most skins do!). If you don’t want to see these messages you can either turn this option on or use a better browser!
13. Generate Media RSS feed: RSS is, generally taken to stand for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, although some might say ‘Rich Site Summary’. It is a method that allows visitors to easily be made aware of updates to your site, by ‘subscribing’ to your RSS feed.

Naming

Advanced - Naming Settings Keep your pages web friendly!

1. Index page name: For most web servers, the default page in a directory is named index.html (or index.htm), it is the file looked for when entering a URL without a file name at the end. Only change this setting if you are sure you know why you want to and what its effect will be.
2. Page extension: The extension, html, stands for ‘HyperText Markup Language’ and is the default extension for static webpages, sometimes the extension used is just htm. Other extensions used for web pages, such as asp, which stands for ‘Active Server Page’ and php, ‘PHP Hypertext Preprocessor’ are ‘server side languages’. jAlbum produces static html pages that are designed to run on the visitors machine, server side languages run on the server, feeding the visitor with a dynamically made page. Only change this setting if you are sure you know why you want to and what its effect will be.
3. Disabled name fields: The fields enclosed in the rectangle that are all disabled, it is a feature that was never implemented, and probably never will be as it could lead to all sorts of problems. The default names can be replaced, if you need to and are confident it won’t cause problems, or that you can resolve any problems. You must edit the file ‘system/init.bsh’ in a text editor and add the following code: setAccessibility(true);

   engine.slideDirectory="newSlideDirectoryName"; engine.closeupDirectory="newSlideDirectoryName"; 
   

Note: You would need to keep a backup of this file, or at least the modified code as this file is part of the application! As they say though, if it isn’t bust, don’t fix it!

4.

URL-encode links: File names that include spaces or language specific characters, such as £ and €, are converted to web safe entities, such as %20. If this option is selected then ‘Generate web-safe file names’ (4) is disabled.

5.

Generate web-safe file names: This will convert any characters in file names to URL valid character, for example an ampersand ‘&’ character will be replaced with a dash ‘-’. Note: files and folders, created outside of jAlbum, will be flagged with a small warning triangle, if they contain unsafe web names. Inside jAlbum some unsafe characters, such as the ampersand are, by default, prevented from being used by a preference setting, Preferences/Album/Illegal characters. This option is disabled if ‘URL-encode links’ (3) is selected.

User Variables

If you want to use your own variables in edit mode, you first need to define then here. Edit mode allows you to alter or apply variables on a per file basis, for example changing the thumbnail or slide image bounds.

jAlbum also provides a special class of variables, known as Image filters. Used here they will apply the filters to all of your thumbnail and close- up images.

Name

This is the actual name of the variable to be defined or one already existing. As an example, some skins have template pages that check for a variable named ‘pageID’. This variable controls the overall style to be used for the design of the template, but if one does not exist it uses a fallback (its own) design. Now you want to use that template with another skin that also has templates, but use a style called ‘pages’ for templates. In the name section enter ‘pageID’.

Value

This is the field where you enter the value to be assigned to the variable named above. Taking the example from above we would enter the string, say, ‘pages’. The template now builds a web page that has the same overall style as native templates that use a style called ‘pages’.

Contextual menu

Control/Right clicking on the rows of variable names/ values brings up a contextual menu with the following actions:

• Cut - cut the variable and value
• Copy - copy the variable and value
• Paste - paste the variable and value
• Insert row - insert empty row
• Delete - delete the variable and value

These all help to speed up your work flow, especially if you are using variables in the edit mode on some files.