14 DAY TRIAL // Sharing images over the Internet has become a common practice nowadays, and everyone seems to have unleashed their artistic spirit. As a result, simple solutions that will make your pictures look amazing in a matter of minutes are highly regarded. This is where JAlbum comes in. The fact is that this solution brings together two very useful features: it creates beautiful albums and offers you the possibility to immediately share them. The combination is simply irresistible.
The Looks
JAlbum has a very simple and highly functional interface, separated in three different areas. On the top left side you can see your album content than can be organized by folders. On the bottom side you have the Settings area, and on the right one you can preview the included pictures. Moreover, if you need a basic image editing feature like red eye, sepia, pixelate, or if you just have to flip the picture, just select it and press the Edit button situated on the top toolbar. Not only can you quickly perform these changes, but you can also undo them just as easily. The Edit area also allows you to add comments and ratings to your images.
The Works
Once you have installed the software and created a JAlbum account, it will take you approximatively 5 minutes to produce and publish an album over the Internet. Give it a name, drag and drop images, choose the skin and the style, and press the Make Album button situated in the Setting area. You will automatically gain access to the JAlbum preview option. The feature allows you to see the it from your local disk, giving you the chance to bring about several adjustments before making your work available online. And, if you add a set of pictures but you are not sure you want to publish them, you don’t have to remove it right away. Just press the exclude button, and the images will remain available in case you change your mind, although they will not appear in the album until you hit the exclude button again.
Apparently, the developer of JAlbum is familiar with this practice, because the Make Album menu also provides a Make Change option that updates the content of your album. And indeed, given the multitude of skins and styles available, it is very hard to decide. If the styles have a limited number, you have the possibility to add new skins every day. Right under the Skins drop down menu you can access a direct link to the JAlbum website, where you can find templates created by JAlbum community members. You are allowed to download and add them to your JAlbum application in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, the customization options do not end here.
The Settings area in the main window is just the tip of the iceberg. If you press the Settings button, you will be able to change the image directory or the output folder, change the image ordering, the thumbnail layout, the scaling method, the JPEG quality, the image linking rule, or the user variables, but also the default page naming rules.
The last panel in the Settings window provides access to the current skin options that are usually different form case to case, so explore a little before publishing: you never now what you could discover. Of course, if you want to see all these changes in the final product, make sure you press the Make Album button once more before publishing.
All you have to do in order to share your album is log into your JAlbum account and hit Publish. Still, the use of this account is optional. Should you press the little arrow situated on the right side of the Publish button, you will be able to see all the available accounts and access the account manager in order to create new ones.
The fact is that JAlbum provides a free account that is limited to 30MB, but also offers you the possibility to have more storage space by allowing you to acquire a Premium (1Gb storage space for €19/year), or a Power(10GB storage space for €95/year) upgrade. The albums stored in a free account will also display adds, however the Premium and Power accounts don't.
The JAlbum website provides video and written tutorials, and one of them concerns manual integration, so make sure you check them out. The process is actually quite simple and requires very basic HTML knowledge.
If you have proficient HTML skills and want to give your work a more personal touch, you can modify an existing template or create a brand new one by accessing the skin editor feature made available through the Tools menu. The same menu provides access to external tools, like adding JPG comments, batch and rename files or links, or the album size calculator. If you are not sure that all the actions have been performed properly, you may always access the System Console to see exactly what has happened.
One of the latest integrated features makes it possible for you to add widgets on the bottom of a published album. There are currently five widgets available: About, Comments, Visitor Counter, Name Tagger, and Share. Their goal is to display general pieces of information on the album and to keep you in touch with the JAlbum community. Still, at least one of them tends to have a rather frustrating effect. The Comments widget is designed to display the current comments, but also allows the user to easily post his. Sounds simple, however you will soon discover that your message must have a certain length, although the necessary dimension is not specified.
The Good
The Bad
The Truth
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
