jAlbum/Explore

This view mode lets you explore your project's files, add, rearrange and delete items, select items for editing and enter titles, comments and keywords.

Projects pane

You can sort your recent projects, by clicking on the 'recent projects' button, alphabetically ascending or descending. The number of recent projects can be set in Preferences/General, each project has a thumbnail, set by using the 'use as folder thumbnail' as shown below. The selected project will show any folder structure below its name, sub-folders can be shown by clicking on the right-facing small triangle to the left of the folder's name. Clicking on on of the sub-folders will update the explore view to show the contents of that folder. You can drag images from one folder to another by dragging its thumbnail over the project's folder icons.

To the right of the project's name is a small downward facing triangle, clicking on it opens up a contextual menu.

• Settings Opens the last used settings window.
• Skin settings Opens the select skin's settings window.
• Collaborative album Either start or stop collaboration by attaching/detaching your jAlbum 'inbox' to the project. If the project is already setup for collaborating you can invite collaborators and check for any new objects from your collaborators.
• Make album Make or update the album.
• Preview Preview the local album, within jAlbum if integrated browser is enabled or an external browser if not.
• Publish Publish your album to the internet.
• Upload/Manage Mange your internet accounts, lets you select an upload location for each album.
• Embed album Generates the HTML code to embed your album using iFrames.
• Close album project Close the current project and select the 'empty' project ready to make a new project.
• Delete You can delete the local album, the published album or the entire project.
• Remove from list Remove the current project from the recent projects list.
• Rename Rename the current project. This actually changes the project's folder name on your disk drive.
• Album information Provides information on your project including the date of any recent changes:

The location and name of the project settings file, the default name is album-settings.jap.

How many images and their total file size; the location of the project folder on your computer.

Local album, location and number of files and folders along with the total storage space. The local album can be deleted by clicking on a small trash can icon.

• Published album If the album has been uploaded to the internet then you get the same information and options as above but for the remote content.

The toolbar

• Add: Clicking the ‘add’ button will open a file chooser allowing you to navigate to your files and folders where you can select items to be added to your project. You can also drag and drop photos, videos or folders onto the thumbnail window pane. Click the arrow to access Facebook import and Camera import.
• New folder: This button adds an empty folder to your currently selected folder.
• New page: This will open a drop down menu were you can choose a template page to add. The default is an empty page, which shows for all skins, other pages will vary by skin, for example Turtle has About, Contact, NewPhotos and Sitemap.
• Use as folder thumbnail: This will select the thumbnail image to be used, on the index page in the album, to represent the current folder. Note, not all skins support this feature.
• Exclude/Include item: Excluding an item keeps it within the project but excludes it from the generated album. This button toggles the state. An excluded item has a red circle with a white bar in it.
• Rotate left/right: Rotates the image 90° to the left or to the right. This will rotate thumbnails, slide, hi-res and folder images, but not originals in the generated album. Note: jAlbum won't psysically rotate the original images in order to not cause any data loss with JPEG files. Instead jAlbum simply modifies an "orientation flag" of the image that tells how the image should be viewed.
• Filter bar: This toggles the status of the filter bar (Cmd/Ctrl + F). You can filter by star rating, flag, keyword or by any combination of them. To filter, click on the stars and/or flag icons of your choice and/or enter a keyword. Only items matching all of the criteria will be shown.
• Undo: This will undo multiple levels of recent file operations such as move, rename etc.
• Redo: This will redo multiple levels of recent file operations such as move, rename etc.

File attributes

• File name: Displays the actual file names of the items in the explore pane. Clicking on the text just below a selected item will put the text for that item in to edit mode, with the filename and extension selected ready for renaming. Note this mode renames the actual items in your project directories.
• Title: Changes the text displayed below items to titles. A title can be used to change the displayed name of an item in your completed album. For example a file name can not contain certain illegal characters, but they can be used within a title. If no title has been added then the base filename (no extension) is used by default. Note the text color changes to blue for items that have titles applied.
• Comments: Changes the text displayed below items to comments, if no comments has been applied then the file name is displayed as a navigation aid. Unlike titles, comments will not show in an album if there is no entry, that is there is no default value for comments. A comments can include HTML tags to format the text in the rendered album.

• Keywords: Changes the text displayed below items to keywords. If no keyword has been applied then the file name is displayed as a navigation aid. Note the text color changes to green for items that have keywords applied. Multiple keywords are entered by separating them with a comma. If, and how, keywords are displayed is skin dependent, not all skins support them.
  
  Once a keyword has been applied it will show up, as a tag with a green background, at the bottom left of the explore pane. Drag and drop one or many keyword "tags" onto album objects to add. Drag and drop one or more keyword "tags" onto the filter bar (CTRL+F1) to filter on those keywords.

Contextual menus

There are two contextual menus within the explore area, the first is Control/Right clicking in the space between thumbnails and the other Control/Right clicking on a thumbnail or hovering over a thumbnail and clicking on 'More'.

Between thumbnails

This gives keyboard access to open and close the filter and address bars, change the size of thumbnail images from small to large. You can change the label type, toggling between showing file names, titles, comments or keywords. Excluded items can be hidden or shown, item ordering can be changed, folders and web pages added and the window refreshed (F5). The slide show can be started and the currently selected item can be edited. New in jAlbum 13 is the Organise setting.

On thumbnails

• Open Opens the selected item or if more than one is selected then the last to be selected.
• Edit Opens the item for editing, if the item is a page template (.htt file) then it opens the code in jAlbum's TextPad.
• Show in file system: Highlights the selected item in a window on your computer.
• Invert selection: Deselects all selected items and selects all those that were unselected.
• Review: Opens the items within the currently viewed folder in the slide show viewer, items in subfolders are not shown. If a set of images are selected then only those images will be shown.
• Use as folder thumbnail: Use the selected image as the thumbnail for the current folder.
• Organise: New in jAlbum 13 is the Organise setting, it can assist you in organizing your files into folders in various powerful ways.
• Set area tags: Display and edit face regions. Press the button labeled ‘Detect faces’, to try to automatically detect faces. If any faces are missed you can click and drag around each face to create a tag area. Tag areas can be named and given a description. The ‘Type’ is set to ‘Face’, changing it will result in a warning, as it might cause problems with other recognition software.

• Set crop focus: For some skins that use cropped thumbnails and/or theme images, such as Turtle, this allows you to adjust the area of an image that will be used for the thumbnail and/or theme image.
• Print selected: Prints a’contact print sheet’ of the selected images. The images are printed on a grid, the size of the grid is selected in a drop down menu. There are also options to include file names and comments for each image.
• Comment Select from Clear, copy from or paste to the comment text for the item.
• List metadata: Opens a window for each image selected that displays all of the metadata for each image. As well as the standard camera data, such as ISO and F-number there is also embedded jpeg, xmp and iptc data.
• Open with: Opens a navigation window so you can select an appropriate application to open the selected file.
• JTextPad[image].txt Will open/create a text file associated with an image, these files can be used as an alternative comment source.
• Image tools: This menu allows you to easily apply images tools added in Edit view mode to multiple images. You can select copy, paste or remove from the submenu. Copy will copy all of the image tool settings applied to the selected image, such as crop, rotation, grayscale effect etc.
• Effects: Displays the currently applied image effects and allows exclusion of effects on an image-by-image basis (See Settings/Effects).
• Rotate: Rotate left or right through ninety degrees. Note: jAlbum won't psysically rotate the original images in order to not cause any data loss with JPEG files. Instead jAlbum simply modifies an "orientation flag" of the image that tells how the image should be viewed.
• Exclude: Excludes the selected items from the generated album.
• Hide: This can only be applied to folders, it includes the folder in the album but does not create any links to it. Visitors must therefore know of its existence to manually navigate to it.
• Include original: This lets you include selected originals within your album even if you do not have 'link to originals', directly or via scaled images, selected in Settings/Pages. Note that the originals are added but that they are not linked to directly from thumbnails, they are linked via the slide page. Don't forget to ensure copy originals is checked on Settings/Pages or that the original image is accessible from the album's location.
• Save copy as: Save a copy of the selected item outside of the current project. There is no duplicate file option but you can use this to save the selected item under another name, within the current folder or add it to a different folder.
• Convert link to copy: This will change a link to a file into a copy of that file, the original file must be accessible at the time of conversion.
• Delete: If added as a link only the link is deleted, otherwise the actual file will be deleted. A warning dialog will appear before deleting actual files as they are completely removed, not sent to the trash!
• Rename: Changes the file name of the selected item.
• Rename items New in jAlbum 13.2 is the Batch Rename function which lets you rename multiple items in various ways.
• Do not re-encode: For videos only; do not re-encode this video, use the original file instead.

Selecting files

You can select one or more images or folders. This can be helpful if you want an action to apply to more than one image or folder, for example exclude more than one image or folder. You can select and deselect several images in different ways.

If you want to select many images in a row you can hold shift while clicking on the images. Start by marking the first image without holding shift and then select the last image while holding shift. All images in between will be selected. Green squares illustrates that the images is selected.

If you want to deselect several images in a row that is also possible when using the keyboard keys. This works the same as selecting images in a row but reversed. You can only deselect the image starting from the end. Hold shift and click on the last image you want selected, all images after that image will be deselected. Dashed green rectangles illustrates that the images has been deselected.

To select multiple images that are not in a row you can instead use cmd (on mac) or ctrl (on Windows). Just hold the key while clicking on the images you want to select or deselect.

You can deselect random images in the same way. Hold cmd (on mac) or ctrl (on Windows) and click on the images you want to deselect.

You can also select images by holding the mouse and drag a square over the images you want to select. See screenshot to the right.

You can actually deselect images in the same way. Hold the mouse and hold Shift or cmd/ctrl (both works the same) and drag a square over the images you want to deselect.