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 Monday 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.
Some skins, such as Turtle for example, may have their own method of linking directories. In this event use only one of the settings, probably the safest is the skins own method.
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 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.
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.
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. xmp is open source and was created by Adobe. You can read more at https://www.adobe.com/products/xmp.html
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.
JPEG
Looks for a caption metadata embedded within the image file.
IPTC caption
IPTC stands for ‘International Press and Telecommunications Council’ and they developed their own metadata format, you can read more at https://iptc.org/standards/photo-metadata/iptc-standard/
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, you can find out more at http://www.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/standard_e/list.cgi?cateid=1&subcateid=4
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.
Title Source
You can select Object Name, Headline, or None! If you are not sure, go for none!
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.
You can see a list of all the metadata for an image by selecting it in explore mode, Cntrl/right clicking it and then selecting 'List metadata'.
Include photographic data in generated images
This option writes the photographic data, as 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.
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?)
Include jAlbum widget support
This option must be enabled before deciding which widgets you want to use. The widgets are configured in Settings/Widgets.
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!
This setting has been removed since jAlbum 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. The album.rss-file that is generated is also needed for the iOS- and Android Apps and for the mobile wrapper at http://jalbum.net/mobile/.
Advanced - Naming Settings Keep your pages web friendly!
Some skins may not support changes to the default values of index page name and extension. If you make any changes and things fail try posting in the appropriate skin forum.
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.
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.
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";
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!
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’ is disabled.
With jalbum 13 this defaults to on, previous versions defaulted to off.
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’ is selected.
Edit mode allows you to alter or apply variables on a per file basis, for example changing the thumbnail or slide image bounds. If you want to create a global variable, one that will exist for all files, then define it here first.
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:
These all help to speed up your work flow, especially if you are using variables in the edit mode on some files.