Software update: JAlbum 4.5.1

Anyone who has ever tried to make a collection of images and photos available via HTML knows that keeping and displaying this collection in an orderly manner is a difficult task. There are programs available that will do this job for you and JAlbum is one of them. The big advantage of this program is that you can work with your own templates (html and css files) so that you can easily give it your own appearance. Version 4.5.1 was recently released with the following changes:

Changes:

• Skin processing is now over 100% faster for advanced skins that make heavy use of scripting (like BluPlusPlus). The speed is gained by not evaluating common code more than once. See the new “once” attribute for the ja:include tag and the new definition scriptlet type ().
• JAlbum now keep one script interpreter throughout the album generation process.
• The previously hardcoded names for thumbnail and slide directories “thumbs” and “slides” are about to be user configurable. Future versions of JAlbum will also allow prefixes to be set for generated thumbnails and closeup images. Skin developers: Please replace hardcoded paths with calls to engine.getThumbnailDirectory(), engine.getCloseupDirectory(), engine.getSlideDirectory(), engine.getThumbnailPrefix() and engine.getCloseupPrefix() so that your skins won’t brake if users change these settings. In this version, these properties are still read-only. Skins that only use the $XXXPath variables (applies to most skins) need not be modified.
• The JAlbum window now has a new “Preferences” tab for environmental settings (program behavior that doesn’t affect the generated album). These settings can be saved as defaults. These are the available options:
  • The preferred language
  • Look And Feel
  • Debug mode (moved from Advanced tab)
  • If to automatically write comments to images
  • If skins are to be allowed to alter JAlbum settings (moved from Main tab)
  • If to show warning dialogs
  • If to allow hints to blink (What a feature!)
• The advanced tab is now broken down into three sections (main, naming, user variables) to better accommodate new features
• JAlbum now accepts regular expressions to filter out files and directories that should be excluded during album generation. This replaces the previous comma separated list of directories to ignore.
• Skins containing multiple languages ​​may now stuff language files inside a “texts” directory (gives a cleaner file structure than leaving these files in the root of a skin directory)
• Czech translation added. Thank you Pavel. Any Chinese translators out there that wish to help?
• Russian translation added. Thank you Lev and Julian.
• The Horizontal and Vertical skins now also shows the first image on startup instead of a blank page.
• Added a tool that converts filenames to lower case in order to ease publishing to some UNIX servers that convert case
• Bundled skin “BluPlusPlus” updated to v2.5 (No more dependent on Java 1.4)
• Bundled skin “XP” updated to v1.19
• Bundled skin “ExhibitPlus” updated to v1.3
• Bundled the very flexible XBorderFilter image filter by Jens Troeger that allows skins to put a rich variety of frames around images (actually stored within each image)
• The progress dialog time estimate is now more accurate
• The System console window now properly scrolls down as text is being written to it
• JAlbum now also recognizes the “Image Description” EXIF ​​tag written by PS Album as an image comment.

Bug fixes:

• JAlbum would not update generated pages if only a change to the character encoding was made
• The Colorful skin would sometimes draw a broken border around thumbnails on index page (Thanks Bill)
• Shutterfly image printing wouldn’t work with image linking set to “Link to originals” (Thanks Mark)
• The Exhibit skin contained a broken link to a support graphic element
• The “XP” skin didn’t include the meta charset tag
• Drag and drop is again working on Mac OS X. This as JAlbum again uses Java 1.3 for OS X instead of Java 1.4 which has a bug in the drag and drop support. Note Apple has a fix available on Apple Developer Connection too, should you prefer to run JAlbum on top of Java 1.4 for OS X instead

[break] The following downloads are available, please note that a Java environment must be present to use the program.
Windows
MacOS X
IBM AIX
Sun Solaris
Linux
HP-UX
Any Unix Platform
Others (OS/2, eCom station etc)