Create your first jAlbum with the desktop app

Ready to create your first album? Doing so with the jAlbum desktop application is easy, lets you publish to any site and gives you full control over the look and feel of your albums! We'll show you how.

1. Sign up

If you haven't already done so, sign up for a 30 days free jAlbum trial account: http://jalbum.net/signup

If you don't have an account you can still use jAlbum, but you will need your own hosting in order to publish an album. Also, you are missing out on a bunch of neat stuff such as Widgets. You can read more about publishing to you own site in the Publish to your own site tutorial

2. Start the jAlbum application

Download jAlbum: http://jalbum.net/software/download

After downloading and installing the jAlbum application, you should find an icon with our frog mascot Dor in your application/programs folder or on your desktop. Double click it to launch jAlbum.

3. Sign in

Next, simply sign in with the same username and password you entered when you signed up on jalbum.net.

4. Add photos

Adding images to a new album

How it looks when the images and folders are added

Use the add-button to add images or drag and drop images from your computer to the big white area in the jAlbum application. You can also drag and drop folders to jAlbum. jAlbum will ask if you want to copy or link the images, the default is copy. Please read more about this here. Then jAlbum will ask for an album name and a description. Tell the story of your album and click OK.

Since jalbum 12.3 you can also import images from Facebook by using the Facebook importer. On the add button there is a small arrow, if you click on that arrow the Facebook improper will be available. See image above. You can import complete albums or just a few images and you can choose to add your Facebook albums as sub folders in jAlbum.

5. Choose a skin

Select skin and style and see the example of how it will look

Skins are templates that add graphics and functionality to your album. Select a skin for your album in the skin select box. Most skins come in different graphical flavours called styles. Pick a style in the style select box, to create the look you want. You can read more about skins in the skin usage tutorial: link

6. Prepare your jAlbum for the web - Make album

Making the album

Preview of the finished album

Push the Make album button and the jAlbum app will scale your images for the web (without touching your orginals) and make your album.

The album is now saved on your computer and ready to upload!

If you're not satisfied with the result, just make some changes!

Now it's time to publish to your jalbum.net account!

Or publish to your own site!