J-Album, free and it Rocks!

[John_in_NC]

I searched far and wide for a decent web album creator and can tell you that Jalbum is great! It is open source so it is free, the guys did a great job. This allows various options and skins, has an option so your friends can order prints directly from Shutterfly and at the other end of the spectrum the Banana album prevents people from stealing your photos.


If you would like to see an example of a Tractor Pull photos posted with the "Banana Album" skin visit my album at http://album.inspireimages.com/truckpull

The software is available at http://www.jalbum.net

PS> I scanned for spyware and malware, there was none.

[Peter_AUS]

Nothing much different from the many others that are around. You do need to know some Java to add in the extra stuff that is available. There are add on skins available for it, some probably would suit people with design etc, you can develop your own skins, but again you need to understand Java to do that.

The example album above I couldn't connect to.

It does appear to be a free program which is good for those that can't afford to purchase software. But it is basically a bit like the Web generator in Photoshop and also in Dreamweaver, layouts look very similar to those programs.

[davidekholm]

Nothing much different from the many others that are around. You do need to know some Java to add in the extra stuff that is available.

Hi. JAlbum author here. You don't need to know any Java to make your own basic skins for JAlbum, but with that knowledge you can add more fun features. You do need html and some CSS knowledge though.

I know there are a lot of album generators out there, but it seems like JAlbum is far more popular than those pretty basic generators that are part of software packages like Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Album for instance.

I can give you a pointer on the popularity. MSN search counts > 2.5million backlinks to http://jalbum.net (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q....net&FORM=QBRE) most of those links are generated by albums generated by JAlbum. I don't know of any album generator that is close to that :-)

Competing album software I recommend (and hear recommendations of) are: Gallery, Coppermine and 4Images. As I understand it, those are all server side scripts requiring PHP and MySQL support. For those that can handle that set up, they will be happy, but for the masses that want a simple way of publishing albums on any web server (or even CD-ROM, JAlbum should fit like a glove.
/David

[davidekholm]

Nothing much different from the many others that are around. You do need to know some Java to add in the extra stuff that is available. There are add on skins available for it, some probably would suit people with design etc, you can develop your own skins, but again you need to understand Java to do that.

I say this again: You don't need Java knowledge to develop JAlbum skins. You only need html and css knowledge. With Java knowledge however, you can expand the number of features of the album outside those that come with the base product. Without Java knowledge you can still do a lot of design work in html and css in order to get a personal looking album.

Take a look at the Minimal skin (bundled with JAlbum). It is a perfect base for your own adoptions and contains no Java code. To clarify how simple it is to adopt a skin to your web design without, check out the tutorials on jalbum.net.