JAlbum/Where are my files
| Contents |
|---|
Introduction
This page shows you the folders and files jAlbum uses both for your projects and for any skins or add-ons you install. There are, if you use jAlbum's defaults, in two directories that contain user files, they are My albums and the Configuration. If you want to backup or migrate your jAlbum files you need to copy those two directories to your backup/new computer.
First we'll look at the My albums (your projects) and then the Configuration (skins, external tools, plugins and default settings).
My albums
jAlbum's default location for your projects is a folder called 'My Albums' within your 'home' folder. This location can be checked, or changed, by going to Menu/jAlbum/Preferences/Album (for other operating systems it is Menu/Tools/Preferences). Look for the 'My albums' location, the path to the folder is displayed and can be changed by clicking on the small folder icon to the right of the path. If you want to backup all of your projects or copy/migrate them to a new computer then this is the folder to go to.
Each of your projects will, unless you change it, under Settings/General, be contained within subfolders of that folder. Each of those folders will be named the same as the project's name. When you create a new project the default location for the output album is a subfolder of the project folder, called 'album'. You can change this location for each album or for all future albums by selecting a new output folder in Settings/General and then using Menu/File/Save as default.
Anatomy of a project
Each jAlbum project is made up of files and folders that you add and also those that jAlbum creates. The 'Sample Portfolio' project supplied with jAlbum (Menu/Tools/Open directories/Program to open jAlbum's installation directory and then navigate to samples/Sample Portfolio) is a typical project. We will use that project to look at how jAlbum does its magic.
Let's start with the project's root folder, what you see in jAlbum if you load the project. Once a project is shown in jAlbum's explore view you can see the project folder on your computer by using SHIFT+Cmd/Cntr+I keyboard shortcut. These are the files and folders that can be seen there:
About.htt album albumfiles.txt Bokeh.jpg comments.properties Contact.htt jalbum-settings.jap meta.properties Nature Objects People res Travel
User Files & Folders
The folders for People, Nature, Objects and Travel contain the images that are to be shown in the album. The Bokeh.jpg image, with a circle and bar, has been excluded so it won't show as a normal part of the album. About.htt & Contact.htt are 'page templates' that are supplied with the skin being used, in this case Turtle. As you can guess from their names they are designed to show information about the album and its creator. Finally there is a semi-transparent folder called 'res'. When you add a folder called 'res' jAlbum will convert it to a special type of folder. It is 'hidden' but not excluded, so no links are created to it but any contents are copied to the album's 'res' folder. This 'res' folder contains a 'dummy.jpg' image which is used as a placeholder for the About.htt template's author's image.
Many skins have a res folder that is copied to the album even if the project does not include one. Adding a res folder to the root of your project lets you replace skin res files with your own, as the skin res folder is copied to the album first. For example adding your own wait.gif image would replace the skin's wait.gif file. This allows some degree of customisation of the skin without having to actually modify it, with the added bonus that the modification will survive skin updates.
The Album
The folder named 'album' is the output folder created by jAlbum when you 'make album' and it contains all of the files required for your web album to work. This folder is what needs to be uploaded to your website for visitors to be able to see it.
jAlbum control & Information files
The following files are all plain text files which can be examined with any text editor. If you look at these files note that a # is used before a comment, it is ignored by jAlbum; a \ character is an 'escape' character and is commonly used to make multi-line entries appear as a single line; the = character is used to pair a 'key' to some 'property' associated with it, like a comment for an image or a skin setting.
albumfiles.txt
It stores information about the user files and folders added to the project. Below is the contents of the root folder's albumfiles.txt file.
# This file is created by JAlbum. It sets custom file filtering and ordering for this image directory. # Files not listed here are added to the end of the album # Rows beginning with "-" indicate excluded files. # Rows can have up to 3 tab separated columns according to this scheme: # File name | Target path (for links) | When added (seconds since epoch) # Note: The target path can reference files and directories in other locations and thereby # allows you to compile albums consisting of files from several different locations. People 1373019265 Nature 1373019265 Objects 1373019265 Travel 1373019265 -Bokeh.jpg 1382915383 About.htt 1382915383 Contact.htt 1383053551 res 1383307026
comments.properties
Stores all comments you enter into the jAlbum comments field as shown in explore and edit view modes. For the Sample Portfolio only three files have comments, they are About.htt, Contact.htt and Bokeh.jpg. The comments.properties file contains:
About.htt=You can add custom made pages like this one to your album projects.\ Right click an empty space between two thumbnails and select "New page" to create a new page.\ Right click this page's thumbnail and select "Edit" to edit the source code. Contact.htt=You can add custom made pages like this one to your album projects.\ Right click an empty space between two thumbnails and select "New page" to create a new page.\ Right click this page's thumbnail and select "Edit" to edit the source code. Bokeh.jpg=<h2>Good to know!</h2>\ <p>Click "Make album" to make a full blown portfolio site out of this sample project.</p><br/>\ <p>You can include all kinds of files (images, videos, docs...)</p><br/><p>New pages are added by right clicking on the white area between thumbnails and choosing "New page".</p>\ Good luck!
jalbum-settings.jap
This file stores all of the settings used when you last saved the album (Menu/File/Save project or 'made' the album and 'save project on make album' is checked in preferences). These files are long, due to the number of jAlbum and skin settings possible. An example of the contents of the project file is shown below:
#jAlbum Project #Fri Oct 28 23:19:00 BST 2016 cpuCores=8 style=Linen.css directory=/Applications/jAlbum.app/Contents/Java/samples/Sample Portfolio outputDirectory=album updatedDirsOnly=false rows=999 imageSize=900x600 skin=Turtle skin.fontSize=13px skin.textColor=\#bbbbbb
Skin settings are prefixed with skin. while jAlbum settings have no prefix, such as outputDirectory. Since # normally indicates a comment it has to be escaped with a \.
meta.properties
Tracks information about each folder, such as how files are ordered and the image to be used for its thumbnail. The contents of the meta.properties file is:
ordering=custom folderIcon=Nature descript=Portfolio template album using dummy images
Invisible Items
There is one more folder at the root level, but it is normally invisible in the OS file system. It is a folder called .jalbum and contains four XML files, .info, About.htt.info, Contact.htt.info and res.info. These .info files store information for each file or folder on settings, like cropping, filters, variables and key events such as when the album was last made etc.
Each subfolder of a user's project will also contain a .jalbum folder, albumfiles.txt and meta.properties, comments.properties only appears in the root folder.
If you want to see these files then you can either set your OS to show invisible files or use a text application that can access invisible files. Warning, don't change anything unless you know exactly what you are doing!
You can read more on how jAlbum uses all of these files here
Extensions & Enhancements
You can enhance and extend jAlbum in various ways, such as external tools, plug-ins and additional skins. The location of those additional files is within the jAlbum configuration folder, you can find this by using Menu/Tools/Open directories/Configuration directory or keyboard shortcut SHIFT+CMD/CTR+C
accounts.xml
If you have signed-in to the jAlbum application this will hold those details.
bin
This folder contains things like ffmpeg, used to convert videos to mp4 format, which you might have installed or updated.
defaults.jap
This file contains settings for jAlbum and the default skin when jAlbum starts, see Save as default
ext
This folder contains addition extension files, .jaext, which add extra funcionality to jAlbum.
My accounts.xml
if you have used jAlbum's FTP to upload files then this file stores those FTP settings.
recent-projects.txt
The recent projects shown in jAlbum's explore view are read from this file.
skins
jAlbum comes with several skins but if you install additional skins then they go here. It is important to note that any custom skin will be in this location only.
tools
Any additional external tools, .bsh files, installed from the forums, or written by yourself will be installed here.
If you want to run jAlbum on another computer be sure to copy the above files, in addition to your projects of course:
Migrating projects to another computer/Backing up your projects
jAlbum has a built in method of backing up your projects to the cloud, see Play safe with jAlbum. There is also an external tool that will create the lifeboat file which can be found here and an enhanced version that will include a copy of the skin used, handy if you have made custom changes, which is here. The lifeboat file is a snapshot of your project at the time it is used, if you change any settings or edit any comments etc. You should update the lifeboat file.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License