Grab some popcorn, sit back and enjoy our newest skin – Projector. It was made to offer the best slideshow experience. Yet we didn’t forgot about popular features like search, tags or maps like those found in Tiger skin.

Adapts to the device

The layout consists of 3 main sections: the side bar (function buttons), the cover page (folder info, subfolders) and the lightbox (with the thumbnail strip).

You can choose from 3 different layouts for the “cover page”, see Settings / Projector / Cover page / Title / Type:

Full width

Turntable

Card

The lightbox shows the slide images in full window, and all the other page elements are designed to be the least distractive. Works fine on mobiles; you can even use swipe gestures too to flip through the album.

The thumbnail strip can be placed to any corner: left, right, above or below the picture – it’s up to you. During slideshows the thumbnails get hidden. Similarly the captions on the photos can be moved to your liking – even in the middle of the photo.

The emphasis is on the photo

The idea came from our Wordpress plugin, which was made to showcase jAlbum-made albums within blog posts (or any page by the way). In that plugin you are able to choose from a bunch of spectacular transition effects, which made it popular amongst Wordpress users. We thought this can make a great new jAlbum skin.

There are 9 transition effects available in Projector, of which three works in 3D, see Settings / Projector / Lightbox / Main image / Transition. Click the pictures below to see them in working!

Speaking of the styles, Projector has inherited Tiger’s all 27 styles, so you can easily reproduce the same feel. Naturally, you can customize all the colors, fonts, background images and many more aspects, just like in Tiger. You can add your logo, custom links, and custom content to many places. All the custom pages have received a face lift too, to match the new design.

Technically, the skin is based on the so-called “flex layout”, which offers the best flexibility in arranging and aligning the page sections on different devices. Today all modern browsers support this new layout mode. Internet Explorer 10 and below are not (you guessed), but fortunately their market share has already dropped below 1%. (The poor implementation of 3D effects in Internet Explorer 11 results in a flawed viewing experience with 3D transition types: Cube, Book, Flip).

When you select Projector from the skin selector all the matching settings will be imported from Tiger, Turtle or Photoblogger, because they all belong to the same “skin family”. (If you’re on jAlbum 16 or older, the settings will be imported even from the Empty project! Pay attention!) This feature makes transitions from one skin to another easy, but not all settings work equally good with Projector. Notably the thumbnail sizes have to be adjusted to play nice with the new skin. So visit Settings / Images / Image bounds / Thumbnails and set 90x90 or something similarly small, as larger thumbnails take too much space from the images.

In the near future, Projector will receive even more of Tiger’s advanced features, like the shopping cart and feedback.

Comments are welcome, but please post bug reports in the skin’s forum.

The newly released jAlbum 16.2 comes with two new handy improvements, both a result of requests from you. If you're missing something, let us know!

Adjust camera date

jAlbum now has a function to adjust the EXIF camera date of JPEG images (i.e. the "date taken/original" date). The function works on both individual images and groups of images/folders. Just right click and select "Adjust camera date...". Up pops a dialogue looking like this:

(The date format adapts to your region, here showing Swedish formatting)

Simply select the value (day, month, year, hours, minutes, seconds) you like to adjust, then use the spinner buttons or keys Up and Down to adjust the value. If you have selected multiple images you now also have the option to either set the same new date for all images or to adjust each image by the amount/difference you have entered.

The adjustment is undoable while jAlbum is running.

Duplicate files

Get jAlbum 16.2 now!

jAlbum 16.1 has an interesting new folder linking behavior called "Mirror content". What "Mirror content" does is to create a folder tree mirroring the structure of the added folder, just like when you copy a folder to jAlbum, but the mirrored tree is filled with file links to the contents of the added folder instead of copies. This preserves disk space while allowing complete separation of jAlbum project files and your images.

Background
Historically, when link-adding folders, jAlbum has simply created folder links pointing to the added folders. Folder links preserve disk space and allows you to create new collections of folders in your albums without moving any physical files or folders. They also have the advantage of responding to changes in the target folders. The downside is that you may wander inside a linked folder and unknowingly be managing your original images which resides in a different location than the album project's tree of folders. File deletions made now affects real files, not copies or file links! Pay attention to the address bar above the thumbnails as it tells you what folder you're currently working in.

Usage
If you feel folder links are scary for above reason, consider the new "Mirror content" choice! This will ensure that whatever you do thereafter within jAlbum only affects that album project.
Try for instance to link-add your main image folder, hopefully containing a ton of images, then select "Mirror content" in the popup that shows.

 Now you can go wild with the mirrored tree and for instance use jAlbums Organizer to reorganize the tree of file links, for instance by year, followed by month or location. The only thing that gets reorganized are file links within that album project, (and jAlbum's metadata files are kept with your album project too).