Software update: JAlbum 6.0

Version 6.0 of JAlbum has just been released. JAlbum is a free program written in java and therefore available cross platform with which photo albums can be easily generated on the internet. Some of this program’s strengths include its simplicity of use, full customization of its appearance, and a built-in FTP client for uploading the result to a homepage. One of the major changes in version 6.0 is the way files can be handled. This now looks like the Windows explorer, which makes it easy to change the order of the photos, for example, as can be seen below. The complete changelog looks like this:

changes:

• A brand new image management section with a visual Explorer-like user interface. Stuff you can do now include:
  • Use drag and drop to visually arrange images
  • Arrange images in predefined ways per folder (camera date, file date, file name)
  • Use rubberband selection and keyboard selection (control/shift) to select multiple images.
  • Exclude images you don’t want included in an album without deleting them from disk
  • Permanently delete images
  • Edit properties on images and folders
  • Rename images and folders
  • Run slide shows
  • Set images to indicate album folders instead of using folder icons
  • Rotate images safely and losslessly (only adjusts an image orientation flag)
• New stylish icons and appearance thanks to the Alloy look and feel from Incors!
• Supports several new file formats like TIFF, BMP and JPEG 2000 through the Java Advanced Imaging Image I/O Tools plugin from Sun
• Album folders can now be represented by a thumbnail image instead of the folder icon. Previously this was a feature of some skins, now this functionality is added to JAlbum itself
• Custom album titles and descriptions can now be set per album folder from the user interface
• Reads and writes progressive JPEG images
• JAlbum now auto senses the EXIF/TIFF image orientation info stored by cameras in JPEG images and rotates images accordingly. Note, only generated images are rotated, your originals are kept untouched. JAlbum is also smart enough to not further rotate already rotated images with incorrect image orientation info.
• The EXIF ​​extraction library has been updated to v2.3, meaning a lot of fixes for common problems and support for more camera models. Thank you Drew! One notable improvement is support for reading Windows File Properties (title, subject, author, keywords and comment)
• sftp added. Thank you Joost den Boer for this integration
• JAlbum now recovers from errors caused by images that have corrupt EXIF ​​structures (corrupt images may be ignored though)
• The user interface is now more responsive when pressing “Make album” / “Rebuild all”
• Tools can now be executed from the command line. Use the -runTool switch
• You can now upload albums from the command line. Use the -uploadAll or -smartUpload switches
• JAlbum now includes files found in a directory even if they are not present in an albumfiles.txt file, unless the filenames are prepended with a dash (-). This should remove the confusion caused when adding images to a directory and not seeing those presented in the updated album. This was previously the case if an albumfiles.txt file was present in the image directory. Note however that the albumfiles.txt file no longer needs to be edited manually. It is handled by JAlbum’s new graphical album explorer interface.
• Updated installer (InstallAnywhere by Macrovision) from v6.1 to v7.1. This will hopefully solve problems installing JAlbum on some platforms.
• Bundled Chameleon skin (former DarkOSX) which comes in many stylish styles. Thank you Laza!
• Bundled skin BluPlusPlus updated to v3.7. Thank you Armond
• Bundled skin ExhibitPlus updated to v1.4a. Thank you Mark
• The ignore pattern is now case insensitive
• Turkish translation added. Thank you Bahadir Yigit and Andreas Berger
• Croatian translation added. Thank you Ivo

bug fixes:

• Several skins used to check for existence of flash info in order to figure out if images contained EXIF ​​information. This wasn’t safe. Checks are now done on camera make instead
• Would throw a ClassCastException if encountering images with unexpected EXIF ​​formatting (aperture value encoded as decimal string instead of rational number)
• The Experience skin would give a scripting error if encountering images with weird EXIF ​​originalDate setting

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