Abstract

When you are on vacation it is common to take pictures. When you get home, what do you do with the pictures?

We are going to learn how to create web photo albums with JAlbum to document your trips. This will help you remember where you were as well as share some pictures with friends.

Photo Albums

Many of us like to document places we visit with a photograph. Thus over time we all accumulate a pile of photos on our phones or elsewhere. In the days of film cameras we would have our snapshots to thumb through with friends. If we wanted to make an album, we could purchase a blank album and glue in our snapshots.

But today nearly all photos are digital. Weather we use a cell phone, or a DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) camera we end up with many photos to look through. Another issue is that with film cameras the length of the film limited the number of pictures we took. The film was normally only 20 go 36 pictures in length. Today with memory cards of 32 gig or more we can take thousands of pictures on a single card.

So the question becomes how to organize and share our photos with family and friends. Sending out a few pictures never worked for me since I find it hard to select just a couple. I then came across a program called JAlbum.

JAlbum

Making your first JAlbum album by JAlbum Author

How JAlbum handles files | TUTORIAL | Part 1

Get organized with JAlbum | TUTORIAL | Part 2

My experience

Now that you have seen how the tutorials work, I will give you what I have worked out for me as the work flow.

Organize the snapshots

When I return from a trip I create a folder under my pictures section with the name of the trip. Then I will create sub folders for each of the destinations or days. I then copy the pictures from the memory card to their appropriate location in the file structure.

Select what to display

Once I have transferred all the photos, I go into the individual folders and create one more sub folder named upload. I then review the pictures I brought back in the folder. Some are so bad I just delete them. The ones I want to put into the album I move into the upload folder. This culling separates what I think is worth sharing from those just for me.

Creating the Album

I open the JAlbum app and create a new folder with the name of the trip. I then recreate the folder structure I used in the picture section to hold the photos. Now I copy the pictures from the upload sub folders into JAlbum.

I then select a skin I want to use for the album. These I go through all the pictures and movies making comments on each of them. These comments are what you will read near the pictures.

Lastly I will check which picture is used for each folder and adjust what portion of the picture to use.

Now I create the album and have a look at the output.

Tricks I have learned

I find the preview does not really look right on my computer. So I write the album to a folder under the web browser. I then use my local browser to view the albums. Since all the albums stay in JAlbum, I can go back and modify them again and again. Once I am reasonably happy with the album, I add it to an index file in the web albums folder.

Finally if I am satisfied with the output, I will upload them to my web site. But for those of you who do not have a website, you can upload them to a web page under JAlbum. This is a good way to share the albums.

For more info look at their website JAlbum Web page.

Conclusion

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to create web photo albums to share with family and friends. I am by no means an expert on JAlbum, but it is designed to allow much customization. Enjoy

Written by John F. Moore

Last Revised: Fri Feb 24 06:09:05 PM EST 2023