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JAlbum Changelog

What's new in JAlbum 34.3

Apr 12, 2024
  • News and Updates:
  • Text effect now ensures that text fits (makes font smaller in case text won't fit)
  • New speech bubbles to guide newcomers to the user interface (hinting on use of "Make album", "preview" and "search")
  • Defaults to using background make mode again
  • Runs on Java 22 and JavaFX 22 on all platforms (embedded browser should behave a bit better now)
  • Groovy scripting engine updated to v4.0.20 (from 4.0.12)
  • Internal: New "UsageCounters" API to keep track of the use of various features
  • Updated bundled skins Plain, Tiger and PhotoBlogger
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Mac look and feel would look ugly on systems running dark mode
  • Fixed issue where UI controls that were disabled by skin could accidentally be re-enabled by jAlbum
  • Plain RGB color selectors would incorrectly display alpha channel too

New in JAlbum 34.2 (Feb 18, 2024)

  • News and Updates:
  • The "jAlbum" metadata source now has highest read priority (over "xmp"). See Settings-Advanced-Metadata.
  • The "jAlbum" and "xmp" sources are now broken out from "comment sources" and applies to all kinds of metadata. See Settings-Advanced-Metadata
  • F7 now toggles console window visibility
  • Updated bundled skins Plain and Animatics
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix for errors generated for odd images when including metadata in generated images

New in JAlbum 34.1 (Jan 22, 2024)

  • News and Updates:
  • The mouse wheel scroll speed can now be configured. See Preferences->Explorer.
  • Updated bundled skins Story and Projector
  • Somewhat better error reporting for broken images
  • Bug fixes:
  • Aborting album builds would sometimes trigger a warning notification (since v34)

New in JAlbum 34 (Jan 9, 2024)

  • News and Updates:
  • New item ordering mechanism: Selected items can now be ordered by a number of factors (folders first, name, date, camera date, added date, rating, title, comment, category, type and shuffled).
  • Select-as-you-type added: You can now quickly locate and select items within jAlbum's Explorer by just typing the first few letters of the file name. Select-as-you-type is also implemented in the Project Gallery, MultiMaker and Backup/Restore tools.
  • Folder navigation history added: jAlbum now keeps track of visited folders of the current project and enables you to go "Backward" and "Forward" to quickly peek at folder contents and then return to where you were before. Shortcuts: ALT-Left arrow and ALT-Right arrow.
  • Now supports the "back" mouse button on 4-button mice. This navigates back to the previously visited folder.
  • You now get notified via warning notifications if jAlbum encounters broken images during an album build, and not just after it.
  • The MultiMaker can now list projects under various locations, not just recent projects
  • The MultiMaker now has a new "Apply current settings" context menu that applies the current settings to ALL selected projects. This makes it super easy to, for instance, change skin or style on multiple projects
  • The detail view of the background maker now includes the parent folder's name as well as the current file
  • Added "Type" (file extension) ordering. (The old "Type" ordering was actually a Category ordering and is now correctly labeled "Category")
  • Improved error reporting of background maker: If jAlbum fails to process an object, it's presented as a notification with a clickable link to the failing object.
  • Renamed the "Order by" and "Order folders by" menus to "Ordering" and "Folder ordering" as they in fact MAINTAIN an ordering. Contrast this with "Order selected by" which does the ordering at that point in time only.
  • All current notifications are cleared when beginning a "Make in background" operation
  • Important notifications now comes with a discrete audio signal
  • Bundled skins Tiger, Story and Projector updated
  • Translations for English, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Korean and Turkish updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to folder thumbnails being rebuilt too often
  • Should not require a DISPLAY when running in console mode
  • Developers: Paginator (aka "children" object) incorrectly included error objects (broken images). This caused Plain skin to bail out on broken images instead of continuing the album build.

New in JAlbum 33.3 (Dec 4, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • GIF images now get "Use original" applied automatically. This ensures that animated GIFs always show up animated
  • Bug fixes:
  • Using "Use original" in combination with Variants caused broken image links with some skins
  • jAlbum was sometimes re-uploading the whole gallery when resuming an interrupted upload.

New in JAlbum 33.2 (Dec 4, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • Now "Rebuild all" and "Make Test" also runs in background mode (see Preference setting for background mode)
  • Developers: Skins may now exclude certain file types and categories from builds. See forum
  • Developers: New "earlyinit" init script that allows setting up stuff that needs to be done prior to "init" being called. See forum
  • Developers: The Paginator class now supports including/excluding file types as well as categories. See forum
  • Updated bundled skins Plain, Tiger and Projector
  • Minor UI improvements
  • Bug fixes:
  • Backup tool didn't include originals for linked files in sub folders

New in JAlbum 33.1 (Nov 2, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • Bundled with far more flexible Plain skin v2.1
  • Updated Korean translation
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing reprocessing of folder thumbnails
  • Some user settings weren't respected when making albums in background mode with some skins (Plain for instance)
  • Change indicator (lower-left corner asterisk) did not respond to style changes
  • Fixed old issue with some settings (at least credit links) requiring project to be closed and reopened to be respected

New in JAlbum 33 (Oct 5, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • Rewritten, easier to use Settings window
  • New tools to backup and restore projects. This simplifies the task of moving jAlbum projects from one computer to another. (See File menu)
  • Faster startup (loads project icons in multiple threads)
  • Plain skin is now updated, compiled (loads instantly) and is now the default skin
  • Skins may now supply custom context menu items so users can easily apply settings to multiple items (see Tiger skin)
  • jAlbum now cleans up stale original images from album when making an album after having unticked the "Include originals" setting
  • Developers: Skins may set the skin property singleIndexPage=true to force the generation of one single index page, no matter the rows and cols settings.
  • Developers: Skins that prefer using scripting to produce content rather that html mode + jAlbum's iterators now have a new "children" variable to assist iterating the children of a folder. The "children" variables is of type "Paginator" and supports methods to include- and exclude various file categories and to iterate the children Album Objects in "pages" (i.e. in sets of n items at a time).
  • Moved some context menu items under a "Extensions" sub menu in order to have a more manageable size
  • Made the camera importer tool more clever
  • Developers: Skins may now supply a custom icon (see "icon" skin property)
  • Faster skin loading. Compiled skins can now bypass execution of "onload" file and instead specify a "mainClass" skin property pointing to the UI code. See Plain skin
  • Bug fixes:
  • Better calculation of max window size (earlier versions didn't account for the visual space the OS dock takes)

New in JAlbum 32.1 (Aug 7, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • On Windows 11, popups now use native Windows 11 rounded borders and drop shadows, which gives them a beautiful look
  • Mac version now adapts title bar colors to match system appearance
  • New light and dark UI themes that use macOS colors and look similar to native macOS controls (See Preferences-General-Look And Feel)
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger and Story
  • Updated Croatian translation
  • Bug fixes:
  • The "Do you want to save changes" dialog would sometimes not show (when using multiple screens)
  • The folder property panel would sometimes show up cropped
  • The file chooser dialog would sometimes not show up in front, when opened from the MultiMaker
  • jAlbum's Explorer wouldn't scroll to reveal the last edited object when returning from Edit mode
  • The "OK" and "Cancel" buttons on the crop focus selector weren't translated

New in JAlbum 32 (Jul 20, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • Improved WebP writer. Now produces less blocky and smaller WebP images. See blog post
  • Configurable keyboard shortcuts, even language specfic. See blog post
  • Review mode now applies image tools like "auto correct" and crop to images just like Edit mode does.
  • Better translations: Uses Google Translate to assist translators. See blog post
  • Major updates to bundled skins. Check out new modern styles for Tiger, Story and PhotoBlogger!
  • More robust skin loading
  • jAlbum's "Add from phone" now announces itself on the local LAN (enables external apps to discover jAlbum)
  • Shows spinner pointer if opening folders takes too much time
  • jAlbum now has a complete Italian translation. Thank you IncoMedia!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Polish users couldn't type certain native characters without triggering popup dialogs from jAlbum
  • Navigating folders on slow devices, like NAS storage is again significantly faster (got broken in v30.1 when introducing high quality thumbnails.
  • Developers: importVariables was called twice on skin load. Now it's only called once

New in JAlbum 31.1 (Jun 9, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • "Add from phone" (see blog post) now allows far longer videos and more images to be transferred in one go.
  • "Add from phone" (see blog post) now has an improved progress indicator
  • "Add from phone" (see blog post) window can now be kept open all the time (see context menu), thereby constantly allowing incoming images.
  • Windows version now runs on Java 20 instead of Java 19
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger and Story
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed problem handing images with rating -1
  • Web locations were sometimes double-counted
  • Search bar menu now reappears when search bar regains focus
  • Improved "Add from phone" for Java 14 (Mac) (Improved local IP discovery)

New in JAlbum 31 (May 23, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • Free update to anyone who is on a current support and update plan
  • New "Add from phone" function for direct and fast transfer of images and videos from mobile phones and tablets to the current jAlbum folder. Simply point your phone's camera onto the displayed QR code and follow the link. Works across all mobile devices (Android + iOS). No app installs required.
  • SHIFT-click either preview button to preview galleries on your phone through the provided QR code
  • The embedded browser now has a "Phone previewer" button that allows you to preview and view galleries on your phone using a QR code
  • Collaborative albums now has a "QR-invite" option, allowing people to contribute to an album with their phone images through QR codes
  • The full screen review mode now scales-up images that are smaller than the screen
  • The full screen review mode now displays the image dimensions as well
  • Updated bundled Animatics skin
  • Updated Groovy scripting engine to v4.0.12
  • jAlbum's new "large album build" warning can now be disabled (untick "Show warning dialogs" under Preferences)
  • Translations updated, including Polish. Thank you dear translations!

New in JAlbum 30.3 (May 9, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • New bundled skin: "Plain". Plain is easy to use, plain looking and looks great on both mobile and desktop. See blog post
  • Less surprising long album builds: jAlbum now has an indicator (botton-left corner) showing whether current settings differ from those of the album (white) or whether image settings differ as well (orange = long album rebuild to be expected)
  • Less surprising long album builds #2: jAlbum now warns at the beginning of an album build in case image specific changes has been made to a large project (>100 objects)
  • Less surprising long album builds #3: jAlbum now allows you to revert to the last used settings, thereby avoiding unwanted long album builds. Just click the indicator icon in the botton-left corner, followed by "Revert settings"
  • Less surprising long album builds #4: jAlbum now shows you what changes have been detected. Just click the change indicator in the lower-left corner (an asterisk) and the changes will be revealed.
  • jAlbum will warn if user attempts to use image effects while linking to originals (in which case the image effects are ignored)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Changing to another folder having the same name would not update the theme image selector
  • Deleting images from Review mode would partly lose keyboard focus (Windows)
  • "Show in file system" would trigger an error if the backing file or folder was missing. Now opens the parent folder in such cases

New in JAlbum 30.2 (Apr 7, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger and Projector
  • Windows version now signed with extra high security "EV" certificate
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixes issue where "Sample Project" and "Welcome to jAlbum" projects disappeared from recent project list after restarting jAlbum. (They were only kept if user opened them on their 1:st session)
  • Fixed issue with "Apply ordering to sub folders" only working on the closest level
  • Fixed potential painting issue with high quality thumbnails

New in JAlbum 30.1 (Mar 10, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • The thumbnails of jAlbum's user interface are now sharper than before (using 320x320 pixels instead of 160x160 pixels). See blog post
  • Preferences window reorganized to be more logical
  • Language options are now also presented in your language
  • Improved painting quality of superimposed icons for thumbnails of jAlbum's user interface
  • Improved behavior of "Batch rename files" external tool. Now supports undo + bugs fixed
  • Bundled skins updated
  • Improved performance when making albums using "Process only updated sub directories" option

New in JAlbum 30 (Feb 10, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "Pixelate region" image tool to protect sensitive parts of images
  • 27% faster reading of WebP images
  • Reads WebP images with transparency as well
  • Reads lossless WebP images as well
  • "Order by type" improved to not only consider categories (videos vs images for instance), but also file types within a category
  • Updated bundled Story skin with improved interaction behavior, mobile experience and new thumbnail layout option
  • Updated bundled Tiger skin with improved interaction behavior, mobile experience and new thumbnail layout option

New in JAlbum 29.3 (Jan 20, 2023)

  • News and Updates:
  • New advanced option to remove diacritic marks from generated file names. This improves compatibility with servers that can't handle foreign characters properly
  • Updated bundled Story skin

New in JAlbum 29.2 (Dec 20, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • Keywords can now be renamed and deleted for multiple selected images. (Right click selected keywords in jAlbum's keywords list to reveal new context menu)
  • Improved crop image tool: Now starts off with a full size crop box. No longer defaults to "Keep ratio". Helpful grid lines added to crop box. Use ALT qualifier key for centered resizing.
  • Instead of aborting, will now log unexpected errors and continue album generation for unexpected errors occurring during image processing
  • Improved uploads: Re-enabled "ssh-rsa" encryption algorithm to ease connecting to old ssh servers
  • MultiMaker window now stays on top. (Minimize it or close it if it disrupts the view)
  • Developers: Updates to Work API.
  • Added "copy to clipboard" button to connection error dialog
  • Developers: Skins may now set the cleanResFolder=true skin property if they want the "res" folder to be cleared on each album build
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • External tools adjusted to make use of updated Work API
  • Minor API enhancements (VersionNumber class)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Previewing galleries containing foreign characters didn't work (since 29.1)
  • Textual edits weren't committed to the project if making an album using a keyboard shortcut while editing a text
  • Fixed bug relating to JSON page generation causing JSON pages to be read before being fully created
  • Fixed NullPointerException occurring when editing a JSpinner in Edit view->Raw settings and leaving Edit view while using some skins
  • Fixed problem with HTML editor

New in JAlbum 29.1 (Nov 1, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • Now uses up to 8 CPU cores for image processing instead of 4 for faster album builds
  • Faster page processing due to better parallelism when updating pages (most noticeable on networked disks where up to 6x write speeds have been achieved)
  • Faster metadata reading during album builds due to better parallelism. Now uses 24 threads instead of # of CPU cores. (most noticeable on networked disks where up to 3x read speeds have been achieved)
  • Faster counting of # of total files during album builds due to better parallelism.
  • jAlbum now remembers the thumbnail zoom position between sessions
  • More conservative rewrites of resource files during album builds. Speeds up album builds.
  • Removed obsolete code
  • Developers: New Profiler API to address performance issues
  • Developers: Now supports Groovy properties in skin UIs
  • Developers: Dump threads now separates active from passive threads for quicker analysis
  • Avoids creating already created directories. Improves album build performance
  • ZigZag skin now allows order of images and text to be reversed
  • ZigZag skin now uses Groovy as scripting language
  • Prints status info during album builds for file attribute reading too
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • "Show in file system" was causing failure launching the external browser afterwards (Windows only. Since v29)
  • Deletion of unused JPEG images didn't work properly when switching from JPEG to WebP
  • Fixed rename error occurring if one edits a project name and directly clicks on another project
  • Fixed bug causing missing folder descriptions for non JSON skins (since 29.0.2)
  • Fixed error when writing WebP theme images
  • Minor bug fixes

New in JAlbum 29 (Oct 5, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum now runs natively on M1 Macs ("Apple Silicon") too. 3x speed improvement!
  • Mac versions now using new "Metal" graphics pipeline (more energy efficient)
  • Future proofed: Runs on Java 19 instead of Java 14
  • Faster JPEG processing: 1,25x vs previous version
  • Faster WebP writes: 1,94x faster vs previous version (Sample Project)
  • Faster HEIC image reading: 1,69x vs previous version (iPhone 12 HEIC images)
  • Faster TIFF image reading: 5,6x vs previous version
  • More robust reading of TIFF and PSD files
  • System console: More clever scrolling of output panel. Ability to execute statements in either panel
  • Windows version now has a fully working "Open in file system" ability
  • Supports new image formats: HDR and IFF
  • Easier to set up monitored projects (projects that gets updated and uploaded once changes are made)
  • Updated sftp library capable supporting modern encryption algorithms
  • Updated Groovy language support (v4.0.4)
  • Updated JavaScript language support
  • All external tools rewritten using Groovy (shorter, cleaner code examples)
  • Updated BeanShell scripting language to comply with Java 18's module system
  • Updated look & feel library. Improvements to Windows rendering
  • MultiMaker can now force rebuild projects. (Use ALT key)
  • MultiMaker now keeps green color on made projects until window is closed and reopened
  • Recovery tool is now aware of Variants (making better choices when recovering)
  • Updated skins, including an updated Responsive. Thanks Jeff!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to recovery tool not handling certain file name combinations
  • Fix: File->Recent projects->Clear wasn't working properly
  • Fix: If a skin disables widgets, then the widget activation button under Settings->Widgets is also disabled
  • Monitoring is now paused for the currently open project (to avoid spurious updates while working on current project)
  • Minor bug fixes

New in JAlbum 28.1 (May 15, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • Will now warn if a skin update also requires a jAlbum update
  • Updated Polish, English and Swedish translations
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger, Story, Projector and Minimal
  • When uploading projects in the background, jAlbum no longer pops up the resulting gallery in the browser. A notification is shown, and that's enough for background tasks.
  • jAlbum no longer does regular network calls to check for new "collaborative images" if no such projects are active
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to accidental deletion of audio clips if an image is renamed when only the case differs
  • jAlbum was reprocessing excluded images that were used to represent folders every time, therefore slowing down repetitive album builds
  • The progress bar wasn't updated while processing excluded images that are also used to represent folders
  • The progress bar could sometimes display more progressed than total images
  • jAlbum would buffer up and flood our servers with checks for "collaborative images" if the computer was woken up from sleep
  • "Import settings from published album" would fail if album is hosted at jalbum.net and URL ends with a slash
  • jAlbum would incorrectly generate the "imageRenditions" variable and JSON file entry for 360 images lacking renditions

New in JAlbum 28 (May 3, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • Support for attaching and recording audio clips to objects. See sample album
  • Skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger, Projector, Story and Minimal updated to play audio clips.
  • The image tools "Straighten", "Brighten" and "Gamma" now gets keyboard focus when activated. Use cursor keys to quickly adjust values and Enter to save.
  • Developers: Various API improvements: New MediaUtil class to simplify retrieving metadata from media files. MonitoredWorkQueue can now indicate progress. JSmartToggleButton now has a "selectedText" state.
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Developers: Skins may now disable arbitrary non-relevant UI components
  • Developers: Use new audioClipPath, audioClipType and audioClipDuration (TimeCode instance) variables when present to produce audio player for objects that have attached audio clips
  • Bug fixes:
  • Infinite "Make album" - "Upload" loop for monitored projects fixed
  • Fixed broken folder thumbnail images for folders containing dots (since v27)
  • The status bar sometimes indicated "make (All)" while in fact only changes were being made.
  • Fixed some bugs introduced in v27

New in JAlbum 27 (Mar 25, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "folder thumbnail" image category now managed by jAlbum, thereby unburdening skins from managing folder thumbnails. jAlbum managed folder thumbnails can have sizes, shapes and image filters that differ from ordinary thumbnails and closeup images.
  • Minimal skin now supports "folder thumbnails". See sample gallery
  • Faster builds: Now uses fewer IO calls during album builds. (The "Sample Portfolio" project was built in 20% less time on a networked drive using a 4 core computer)
  • Pops up progress dialogs faster during album builds
  • Developers: Skins may now call engine.setStatus(String message) to provide better status reporting during long builds.
  • Developers: engine.setSlides() now working from within init scripts
  • Updated bundled skins.
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug in font selector
  • jAlbum didn't print the reason for aborted album builds if the background engine was used

New in JAlbum 26.2 (Jan 28, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • Added a "Set as default" button to the text filter of jAlbum's edit view (advanced section) to facilitate adding texts to multiple images. (Alt-click button to reset)
  • The background uploader now also updates your profile page on added galleries (if you're signed in, that is)
  • Updated Korean, Finnish, Slovenian and Polish translations. Thank you translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum would sometimes write duplicate file entries to the albumfiles.txt file

New in JAlbum 26.1 (Jan 5, 2022)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "Background mode" preference: Use background processing when hitting the "Make album" and "Upload" buttons
  • Lower resource usage (threads)
  • Lower CPU usage during uploads (especially for Mac version)
  • Reports amounts > 1 GB as GB (or TB if needed) instead of reporting amounts in MB only.
  • Upload speed reporting for background uploader
  • Background uploader now pops up a confirmation window on first upload or when uploading to a new location
  • Faster (multi-threaded) local size calculation
  • Background uploader now updates progress bar during long file transfers too
  • Faster local vs remote file comparison before upload begins. Total gain for 26 GB networked gallery: 1 min 30 sec vs 15 min
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger, Projector, Lucid, Animatics and Story
  • More robust abortion of uploads when not using zipstreaming
  • Windows version now bundled with the latest Java 14 (v14.0.2)
  • Added find & replace dialogs to System console and "List metadata" tool. Hit CTRL/CMD+F or CTRL/CMD+R to open dialogs.
  • More responsive abortion of background uploads
  • More detailed progress reporting during uploads
  • Minor usability improvements to find & replace dialogs: ESC key now closes all the time. Beeps when searching past last matching string. Selects all text to find when reopening find dialog
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators
  • Bug fixes:
  • Windows version was leaking "User Object" resources, eventually triggering out of memory conditions. (Fixed by updating embedded Java to v14.0.2)
  • Fixed bug causing negative time left estimates on huge galleries
  • Removed erroneous progress reporting during uploads ("x of 1 files")

New in JAlbum 26 (Dec 8, 2021)

  • News and Updates:
  • Faster loading of HEIC image thumbnails
  • Windows version now offers more screen real estate as the title bar and menu bar are integrated into one bar
  • Faster uploads: The deletion of old stale files from earlier uploads is now performed over multiple connections.
  • New license model: Moved from 30 day trial to a non expiring free version. Users that don't have a license can now run jAlbum 26 forever, but with some limitations, see purchase page
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed occasional StackOverflowException on startup
  • Improved skin loading robustness

New in JAlbum 25.1 (Nov 16, 2021)

  • News and Updates:
  • Faster consecutive background builds. (Better caching of script related data between album builds).
  • No longer invalidates a working license if user signs in with an account that doesn't have a license
  • Updated 3:rd party Groovy scripting language library to v3.0.9
  • Updated 3:rd party JSON writing library to v4. More RAM conservative.
  • More informative if web root is missing (printed "null" earlier)
  • Updated bundled skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • Exiting jAlbum on Ubuntu Linux didn't work (system tray not available)

New in JAlbum 25.0 (Oct 6, 2021)

  • News and Updates:
  • 30 new trial days for everyone. Free update to anyone who is on a current support and update plan
  • Albums can now be made and uploaded in the background while you continue working with jAlbum. This is a huge time saver!
  • Project monitoring: jAlbum monitors projects for changes and makes and uploads changes automatically in the background
  • Improved MultiMaker: Make and upload multiple projects easily. Now with a rewritten more informative user interface and adapted for the new background processing engine.
  • 100% faster image processing* (Measured on a full rebuild of a 80 image gallery consisting of 16MPixel images)
  • Lower memory usage for image processing.
  • Faster metadata parsing. The time to read .properties files (for instance long folder comments) has been reduced by several magnitudes.
  • Better reporting: Started, completed, aborted or failed make- and upload tasks are now clearly reported to jAlbum's system console along with project name and timing information
  • The Preferences-Details panel has now been given more space
  • Added Creator, Copyright and Copyright URL metadata to the album maker's change detection
  • Improved error reporting
  • Updated bundled skins.
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators for your help with translating this version
  • Bug fixes:
  • The property panels of jAlbum's Edit mode did not always fit
  • jAlbum could sometimes hang when opening projects while a Tiger skin was loading
  • The JAlbumUtilities.countCategories() API included objects in hidden files

New in JAlbum 24.1 (Jul 14, 2021)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum's system console can now be accessed via the F7 keyboard shortcut even if the progress dialog or upload window is active.
  • Bundled updated Tiger and PhotoBlogger skins
  • Added mkv as supported video format
  • More robust skin loading: Recovers from inability to write certain property values to UI components
  • Added warning dialog when choosing WEBP as single output format
  • JAlbumUtilities.getCameraDates now no longer falls back to file dates
  • Bug fixes:
  • Didn't always release ftp connections (happens when doing empty or nearly empty uploads). Old bug
  • Now a cap of 16 upload threads to avoid out of memory / thread conditions if connections hang during upload
  • Delete local album was resetting the structure type to "mirrored" even though the UI didn't reflect this
  • Changing file dates didn't work (broke with Java 9)
  • More robust against problems populating the recent project list
  • Forgot to add support for superimposing a play icon on video thumbnails on v24
  • Directory chaining didn't handle linked folders properly

New in JAlbum 24 (Jun 30, 2021)

  • News and Updates:
  • Variants introduced to image processing: Now lets the browser choose the image size and format that best suits the user's display (See Settings-Images-Variants) and read our blog post
  • Reads and writes the improved WebP image format
  • Reads the improved HEIC/HEIF image format (commonly used on iOS). Credit to IDR Solutions (JDeli)
  • Bundled with major update to Mininal skin now supporting Variants, multiple icon sets, cleaner look and responsive, full window slide images
  • Bundled with major update to Tiger skin now supporting Variants, instant preview and improved zooming.
  • Two types of directory chaining offered: "Full tree" vs "Siblings"
  • Handles flipped images as well
  • Faster object counting (uses multiple threads, skips ordering objects)
  • Better error reporting if jAlbum fails to start
  • Made folder deletions more consistent
  • Database file importer now better detects type of CSV files passed
  • Developers: New API calls to retrieve objects faster (unordered) and to retrieve filtered lists of objects
  • Developers: New ja:picture tag to simplify adding Variants support
  • Developers: New imageSrcset and thumbSrcset variables for Variants support
  • Developers: Hidden folders are now marked as "hidden" in generated json files
  • Developers: IO.zip now allows FileFilter to be specified
  • Reads user configurable config dir/system/filetypes.xml too
  • Added "currentFolder" variable to external tools
  • Updated translations: Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed ConcurrentModificationException in uploader
  • Search bar now resizes target window so controls fit
  • AlbumObject.getDescendants now handles (ignores) circular folder references
  • Fix for Windows not being able to write properties to hidden files
  • The image file chooser of the web location panel didn't pick up the right folder of the currently selected image

New in JAlbum 23.2 (Feb 12, 2021)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum now interprets flipped/mirrored images correctly (mobile phone selfies for instance)
  • New flip/mirror button added
  • Improved error reporting if errors occur during uploads
  • Folder icon changed from bluish to outline for better visibility.
  • The theme image selector of the folder properties panel now has an "Edit" context menu that opens the current image in a larger window
  • Adjusted colors of the crop focus to comply with dark look&feel
  • Changed more icons from png to scalable svg (broken images, broken links etc)
  • Removed several unused icons
  • Updated bundled skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed collapsed property panel when opening Edit mode (old bug)
  • Replaced Windows file chooser library (from xfilechooser to JNA). Now we rely on one library less

New in JAlbum 23.1 (Dec 13, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • Faster auto correction processing
  • Significantly faster previews
  • Updated bundled skins PhotoBlogger, Story, Animatics and Lucid
  • Minor robustness improvements
  • Bug fixes:
  • Mac version would sometimes not run on enough RAM memory
  • Updated broken facebook importer (now complies with updated facebook APIs)
  • Would sometimes fail building albums with an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
  • Preview window would sometimes trigger a not needed album remaking
  • MP4 video GPS coordinates weren't imported as jAlbum gpsLongitude and gpsLatitude variables causing videos to not be correctly positioned on maps.
  • Fix to logic determining if an image is a photo-sphere or not

New in JAlbum 23 (Nov 19, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • 30 new trial days for everyone. Free update to anyone who is on a current support and update plan
  • Faster/snappier Explorer view. Feels 30-50% faster on a 4 core CPU
  • Faster album remakes (around 20% on a 4 core CPU), due to better use of multiple threads
  • Faster filter processing due to better use of multiple threads. Image filters are now required to be thread safe (i.e. not contain state that changes during execution of the filter() method). (Filters that aren't thread safe should have their filter() method marked with the java "synchronized" keyword.)
  • Faster initialization of consecutive album builds. Cuts about one second from album builds.
  • Now allows hiding of web pages. (For supporting skins only. See Story skin)
  • New "Last tool" menu item that executes the last used tool, including external tools and plugins. It's bound to the CTRL/CMD+L shortcut and can be accessed from both the Explore view and Edit view. This feature considerably speeds up accessing a commonly used tool while moving through album objects.
  • Improved drag and drop behavior: You can now decide to either position dropped files on the caret location (jAlbum switches to Custom ordering) or to let the default folder ordering decide the position. The behavior depends on where you drop (drop in the margin area to let the folder decide)
  • When jAlbum switches sort ordering for a folder, this is now indicated clearly with an animated text
  • Updated metadata-extractor library to v2.15. Now reads Exif from PNG and HEIC/HEIF images and supports MP4 GPS coordinates among other fixes and improvements.
  • Now allows ordinary web pages to be put inside the "res" folder (included in "res" folder of output)
  • New "Import comments from rss file" external tool to import comments from really old albums (prior to jAlbum 8.14).
  • Paints user installed external tools in bold (Windows + Linux)
  • jAlbum's text editor and system console now understands Lua language syntax too
  • jAlbum's text editor now adjusts the line number font size in accordance to the text font size
  • Updated JNA library from v4.5 to v5.6 thereby improving compatibility and performance when interacting with native OS calls.
  • Paints hidden items somewhat darker now for better visibility on bright look and feels
  • Updated non-thread safe filters XBorderFilter, AutoFilter and PropertyChangingFilterWrapper to be synchronized
  • Updated bundled skins
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Mac version wouldn't work properly on Mac "Big Sur" OS (object deletes, skin updates for instance)
  • Fix to occasional make album crash when switching skins directly followed by making albums
  • jAlbum should now never accidentally suggest to upload a gallery to a folder called "album"
  • jAlbum now remembers even if you upload to the root of your ftp directory (valid for non jalbum.net accounts). It would previously always suggest the project name unless a target folder was set.
  • Color selector wouldn't work under Java 8
  • jAlbum now remembers the sort order and adds newly added files to the right ordered location if you add files using the "Add" button. So if you have "Order by camera date" set for instance, then adding files using the "Add" button will put them in the right order directly (required a screen refresh before)
  • Dropped items were not always positioned correctly
  • Fixed bug where nothing was printed to the system console if one executed "print" in JavaScript from within the console (swapping back and forth between languages resolved it though)
  • Dropped items would be re-arranged surprisingly on next screen refresh
  • Fix to incorrect references to global context (wrong engine could sometimes be referred to)
  • Woudln't print camera dates older than Jan 1 1970 in the tool-tips of objects of the Explore view
  • Fixed repainting of thumbnails when "Hide" is toggled
  • Revisiting the Arty image tool in edit mode several times for the same image would result in multiple versions of the Arty UI
  • jAlbum's text editor didn't remember the last selected font size
  • Division by zero error when processing empty albums

New in JAlbum 22.1.0 (Oct 9, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • Added metadata import tool for ACDSee
  • The originalDate variable is now also generated for videos (mp4 and QuickTime)
  • Added help button to html editor
  • The external tools list is now ordered case insensitive
  • Updated bundled skins Story and PhotoBlogger
  • Updated translations. Thank you translators!
  • Developers: Added allowHTMLEditing and fullHTMLEditing client properties to smart text component so these features can be added without skin requiring jAlbum 22
  • Removed Java 11 dependency
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed issue preventing jAlbum from starting due to a corrupt "Java Assistive Bridge" installation
  • Mac version could occasionally crash when hitting the Add button to open the file chooser
  • Text components shouldn't have hover buttons
  • Fixed issue where renames to newly created folders would be interrupted
  • jAlbum's deep-data.json generation could cause out of memory conditions for huge albums
  • jAlbum's search wouldn't work if "My Albums" location was pointing to a non existent folder

New in JAlbum 22.0.0 (Sep 10, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "Multi Maker" window that builds and uploads albums from multiple projects in the background at the same time. See Tools->Multi Maker.
  • Embedded html editor rewritten using new library. (Respects your current tag structure)
  • HTML Syntax highlighting added to description/comment text components
  • Syntax highlighting and variable completion added to jAlbum's system console
  • Updated html editor now shows reduced buttons for ordinary objects, but a full suite of buttons for comments for pages only
  • Groovy language library updated to v3.0.5
  • Developers: New Work API vastly simplifying automating data processing. See new *.groovy external tools for examples.
  • The theme image's crop focus can now be adjusted with the cursor keys as well as mouse (for better precision)
  • Developers: New JSmartSyntaxTextArea component for enabling syntax highlighting in your skins. (It's a drop-in replacement to JSmartTextArea which defaults to html syntax)
  • jAlbum's embedded code editor now has improved syntax highlighting (script elements are for instance colored differently)
  • 8 External tools rewritten to use the new Work API, reducing the code to maintain to 20%
  • Updated bundled skins
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to icon caching (the wrong icon was sometimes delivered)
  • Extremely long project names sometimes caused problems with "Remember last selected item"
  • Embedded browser would sometimes not initialize properly

New in JAlbum 21.0.0 (Jul 17, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • Embedded visual HTML editor! Right-click a comment or description and select "Open HTML Editor" and take it from there. Now you can style your album- and image descriptions without any HTML knowledge.
  • Comes with 5 new modern user interface themes ("look and feels") thanks to the open source FlatLaf project. (The new default "jAlbum Dark" look replaces Darcula, which has become abandoned.). New looks can be added by users to jAlbum's system/themes folder.
  • Icons modernized
  • Now embeds xmp metadata into GIF, TIFF and PNG files as well as JPEG images.
  • Prepared for Oracle's upcoming GraalJS JavaScript engine, which will replace the Nashorn JavaScript engine skins like Tiger and PhotoBlogger currently run on. (Nashorn is no longer present in the next Java version to come)
  • Made Preferences window less tall by using 2 columns for checkbox settings
  • Developers: New system/base.css file providing common styles for the new html editor to all skins (prepended to common.css)
  • Updated bundled Minimal skin. Thank you jGromit!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Edits to folder titles and folder descriptions would get lost if one navigated to another folder using the folder tree without leaving the edited field first
  • Minor bug fixes

New in JAlbum 20.2.0 (Jun 8, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "Group by Calendar" organizer! Images can now be grouped in folders and tagged based on matching calendar events. (See Organize - Group by Calendar)
  • jAlbum now remembers and navigates to the last selected object when loading a project (configurable under Preferences)
  • Skin specific custom web pages (like About.htt and Contact.htt) are now added as "dynamic links"* to projects, instead of as copies. This ensures that these files are also updated when you update a skin. ("Dynamic links" means that the link updates automatically as you switch skin). In short: less ugly error messages when you switch skins in projects that have custom web pages.
  • jAlbum now runs on Java 14 instead of Java 13
  • Develpers: The JFileSelector component now allows file drops to its associated text field.
  • Updated bundled Story skin
  • Old copies of skin specific web pages are now updated on album build. (Backup copies are placed next to updated pages within the project). This significantly eases the move from old Turtle based projects to modern skins, like Tiger
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • "Generate embed code" would break the current album (res folder was emptied)
  • Fix to the "Batch make album" external tool (better error reporting if matching account profile for uploads can't be found)
  • Organize - Flatten was sometimes printing error messages to the system console
  • Corrected help page links

New in JAlbum 20.1.0 (May 14, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • Copy-drag supported! Items can now be copied instead of moved during a drag-and-drop operation by holding down a CTRL (ALT on Mac) while dragging items
  • jAlbum's new details editor view is now enhanced to allow easy copying and pasting of desired metadata aspects like Title, Comment, Author and Copyright between items. For instance: To apply the same title on multiple images, click the "Copy" button next to the title field, then multi-select target items and paste.
  • New Story skin bundled
  • Detects and ignores album folders as input to album projects
  • Displays progress during album builds and uploads in the taskbar icon. (Currently on Mac only)
  • jAlbum now keeps track of of selection after a completed drag and drop operation
  • Improved character encoding detection for EXIF metadata
  • jAlbum's "lifeboat.zip" backup file now always includes the current project settings (previously contained the last saved settings)
  • The addition of web locations made more robust (handles empty img width and height attributes)
  • The "New empty page" option is now disabled if skin lacks full site support
  • Offers to move existing album if target folder is changed under Settings - General
  • Developers: If skins supply their own templates/empty-page.htt, this will be used for the New empty page action instead of the default from system/empty-page.htt
  • Cleaned up old unused code
  • Developers: New addedDateRSS variable. Works like addedDate, but formatted for use in RSS feeds
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Dates could be mixed-up between images under certain circumstances (spotted in album.rss file) due to concurrency. Really old bug
  • The RSS feed (album.rss) would not always update the published date elements. Now uses dates when items were added to album
  • Copying an item that doesn't support xmp meta data, like videos, pages and web locations, wouldn't include applied meta data (titles, comments, ratings etc)
  • Division by zero error if attempting to upload album after no changes made since previous upload
  • Switching projects using CTRL+1-3 while having a text field component focused would lose the edited text
  • Now prints error and skips writing larger than 64KB xmp chunks to images instead of bailing out
  • Corrected painting of move/copy hint next to cursor while dragging items over folder tree

New in JAlbum 20.0.0 (Apr 8, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • New configurable "Details" view mode for jAlbum's explore view to facilitate viewing and editing 12 different metadata items like titles, comments, keywords and creator (See Preferences-Details view)
  • Rewritten upload engine providing better usage of multiple connections which leads to better performance and upload robustness
  • New "Group by Creator" addition to jAlbum's file organizer (organizes images in folders based on the xmp creator)
  • Performance enhancement to comment reading (parses the comments.properties file once per folder instead of once per file)
  • The representing thumbnail and theme image selector of the folder property panel now also allows files to be selected via the file chooser
  • Metadata management library updated from Apache Sanselan to Commons Imaging
  • Skin developer API updates: JDraggableList supports Enum types too. JSONMaker now supports serializing Enums and TimeCode too. AlbumObject.setTitle accepts nulls too (deletes title).
  • Web location editor now handles web servers with incorrectly configured SSL security
  • Updated bundled skins
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed NaN error in upload rate reporting

New in JAlbum 19.3.6 (Mar 9, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • Convert link to copy now also manages sub folders
  • Faster and more memory efficient JSONMaker (affects performance for skins like Tiger and PhotoBlogger)
  • Bundled skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger, Lucid and Animatics updated
  • Mac version now signed and notarized using Apple's new stricter rules
  • Bug fixes:
  • Recovers from IO errors during disconnect by performing a forced disconnect instead

New in JAlbum 19.3 (Jan 24, 2020)

  • News and Updates:
  • Added a "Keep both" option when adding files and name collisions occur
  • New "Date format" preference for how dates are displayed within jAlbum's UI
  • Simplified date format selection. Now suggests formats and presents a live date example.
  • Renamed various terms to avoid confusion. "Make All" is now called "Force Remake". "Make Changes" is now called "Make Test". "Album Project" is now simply called "Project"
  • Updated metadata-extractor library (v2.13)
  • Respects a deleted Sample Portfolio project (doesn't recreate it on start up)
  • Prepared for upcoming gift cards
  • Updated bundled skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • Area tagging could sometimes throw a nullpointer exception (since 19.2)
  • Main window could show up in an unreachable location when disconnecting an external monitor and starting jAlbum.

New in JAlbum 19.2 (Dec 9, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "Duplicate project" function to simplify making several album projects based upon the same set of images
  • New bundled Animatics skin, replacing Mr.Burn5
  • Updated Groovy scripting engine to v3 rc1
  • Less aggressive cacheing strategy when previewing albums using the internal web server (less need to reload pages to ensure you're previewing the correct content)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Face region tags weren't located correctly for portrait oriented images (wasn't following standard)
  • Nullpointer exception on startup if auto-signin active using wrong credentials
  • More graceful handling of broken image metadata (jAlbum would hang on certain images with broken image metadata
  • More robust launching of external preview browser on Linux systems

New in JAlbum 19.1 (Dec 9, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • Now runs on top of Java 13 instead of Java 11
  • Mac version ready for MacOS Catalina
  • New Lucid skin bundled (replacing Fully)
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger and PhotoBlogger
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixes from v19.0.6 service update
  • Mac version had problems handling typing of foreign keys by holding down key and selecting alternatives from menu (fixed due to Java update)

New in JAlbum 19 (Oct 1, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • 30 new trial days for existing users. (This is naturally a free update for everyone who is on a current support and update plan)
  • Multilingual spell checker integrated in jAlbum's text editing UI controls
  • New enhanced search bar added to the top-right corner of jAlbum's window. Quickly locate anything: Settings, preferences, projects and even metadata within the current project like titles, comments and keywords.
  • Updated 3:rd party libraries (JNA, Metadata-extractor and Groovy)
  • Supporters: The feature search now saves a screenshot of the relevant UI window if SHIFT or ALT is held down as one navigates to the UI setting
  • Developers: Added timing information to system console window
  • Now copies any file that's found inside the "res" folder of a project to the "res" folder of the album and not just supported files
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger and Projector
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Strips black borders from appearing on thumbnails from some cameras in Explore view (Nikon and Canon)

New in JAlbum 18.4 (Aug 27, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • Now uses an embedded web server to serve previews, thereby working around problem previewing JSON based albums on external browsers.
  • Uploader now displays current data transfer rate too
  • Updated embedded web server from Jetty 6 to Jetty 9, thereby gaining years of fixes and improvements.
  • Now prints remote album size during size calculation (better feedback during long calculations)
  • Developers: Meta object now added for video too
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger, Projector and PhotoBlogger
  • Updated status bar icon (for album sharing)
  • Updated English, German, French, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish and Korean translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Minor improvements
  • Bug fixes:
  • Windows and Mac versions now correctly formats dates according to the current locale setting
  • The title bar of the settings window could sometimes appear beyond the screen bounds
  • Fixed crash bug when starting album sharing on Linux (Since Java 9)

New in JAlbum 18.3 (Jun 25, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum's Text and Logo effects now supports layers, meaning that, for semi transparent images, the texts and logos may be positioned all over, on top or behind the existing images. See demo
  • You may now individually control whether to force thumbnails or closeup images to JPEG format (see Settings->Images->Advanced)
  • New MarginFilter capable of adding semi-transparent margins/borders to images.
  • Supporting other users? Hold down SHIFT or ALT while searching for a UI setting to have the path written to the clipboard too
  • Developers: Skin UIs may contain tables too (JTable instances) that becomes persisted with the project and appears as variables in the skin. (The generated variables contains the table contents in CSV format)
  • Developers: new getJSONMaker() API call to AlbumBean (engine)
  • Developers: Improved error message for embedded skin editor
  • Updated the bundled skins Tiger, PhotoBlogger and Projector
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators
  • Bug fixes:
  • The settings window could sometimes appear too far to the left or top of the screen
  • Fixed handling of EXIF data for certain images
  • Fixes/updates to Facebook importer plugin
  • Labels would appear faint on OS X Look and Feel (Explore view) if file names were more than 15 characters
  • Minor fixes

New in JAlbum 18.2 (Apr 17, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum now has search!. Type your way to that color or font setting instead of browsing through deeply nested settings panels. Finding the right setting has never been easier.
  • Bundled updated Tiger and PhotoBlogger skins

New in JAlbum 18.1 (Apr 1, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • New work flow indicator to better assist new users in the start-make album-upload album work flow (shows for unlicensed users only)
  • Somewhat faster album deletes when deleting published albums
  • Uploader now has a better auto-discovery mechanism for determining the web root URL and web root folder.
  • Uploader has a new mechanism to auto-discover the ftp server name given the web address. Correctly identified server names turn green
  • Bundled the completely rewritten PhotoBlogger 2.1 skin.
  • Made generic error dialog expandable to reveal full stack trace
  • Minor robustness improvement to uploader. (Reconnects if ftp server reports that data connection is down during transfer)
  • Bug fixes:
  • The preview address of the upload window was incorrectly adding a slash (/) when referencing plain files
  • The upload dialog is now modal in order to avoid bug in Mac OS X where the upload confirmation dialog appears behind the upload dialog.

New in JAlbum 18.0.1 (Feb 12, 2019)

  • News and Updates:
  • New Project Gallery allowing you to visually browse web preview thumbnails of your album projects (See File->Project Gallery or new button next to the "New project" button). The project gallery allows you to explore all projects present in "My Albums" as well as all projects listed under "Recent Projects".
  • Faster album uploads, especially updates to exiting albums due to rewritten media RSS handling and minimizing network IO calls
  • Exclude now deletes cached thumbnails
  • Removed obsolete Show thumbnails with high JPEG compression quality option
  • Removed obsolete Progressive mode image setting
  • Removed obsolete URL-encode links option
  • Languages updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • More robust uploads. Now recovers from upload problems arising due to inconsistencies between the "manifest.jmf" cache file and the true contents of the server.
  • Fixed broken Media RSS generation (URLs weren't absolute)
  • Save changes warnings were sometimes generated even though no changes has been made

New in JAlbum 17.1.5 (Dec 21, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger, Projector and Responsive
  • Added convenience link to Preferences->Album from within New Project dialogue to simplify permanently changing file locations
  • Bug fixes:
  • Media-RSS support was broken (since 17.1) also affecting mobile viewing
  • Album uploads would fail if the "manifest.jmf" cache file got out of sync with the server state. Now detects this and recovers upload instead of failing.
  • Albums using non-standard index page names or extensions ("album.htm" for instance) wouldn't have their thumbnail showing up correctly on the profile page after publishing.

New in JAlbum 17.1.1 (Dec 7, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • Added Dutch translation update.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Deleting published albums via ftp wouldn't work
  • Windows version had trouble handling https based web locations
  • Location editor wouldn't work on Windows (ECDH keypair problem blocking Google maps)

New in JAlbum 17.1 (Dec 7, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • Completely rewritten skin template parser. Potentially faster as templates are now parsed once to an internal object tree (Abstract Syntax Tree) and from there evaluated to final pages multiple times. The new parser not only caches the internal object tree, it also caches compiled scriptlets for scripting languages supporting this (JavaScript and Groovy. BeanShell doesn't compile well so far)
  • Introduced Groovy as scripting language. Note, this is still an experimental alpha. The sharp release is scheduled for Q1 2019. Read more here.
  • Update image reading library to TwelveMonkeys 3.5. Problematic CMYK JPEG images should now work again.
  • Adapted colors for Mac OS X Mojave
  • Now allows preview browser to be operated while building album
  • Removed obsolete "Local Flash preview" preference
  • Added ability to force image processing even if source image is smaller than image bounds and no image filters are applied (Settings->Images->Advanced)
  • Moved "Video support" to Preferences->Advanced (no need to touch for the vast majority)
  • Updated Korean translations for ZigZag, Mr.Burn5 and Responsive
  • Bug fixes:
  • Problematic CMYK JPEG images should now work again
  • Adding some https web locations could cause an SSL handshake error
  • Fixed bug causing loss of skin project settings if loading skin while another skin is still loading
  • Fixed crash bug upon opening preview window on Mac OS X Mojave
  • Ensured that the text field specific undo stack is cleared when the user is about to edit titles, comments or keywords. Users can now safely hit CTRL/CMD+Z to undo without going past initial value

New in JAlbum 17 (Dec 7, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • 30 new trial days for everyone. Free update for you with an active support & license plan
  • Completely rewritten review mode featuring thumbnail navigation, image zooming and multiple image comparison (1-6 images)
  • Way faster and better behaving zoom control installed in both Edit and Review mode
  • Better integration with Review mode and Explorer and Edit mode (hit Space to review selected image(s))
  • Reads EXIF metadata from video files as well (MP4 and MOV)
  • Supports camera date/creation date for mp4 and mov videos too
  • Has new "Disable color subsampling" option under Settings-Images-Advanced. Will produce even better looking JPEGs when checked. Currently only applies to images with compression quality >= 90. Disabling chroma/color subsampling increases file size about 17% but doubles the horizontal and vertical color resolution of images. See this article
  • Explore mode adjusted for lower CPU usage = better performance
  • Now runs on Open Java 11 on all platforms. Earlier, the Mac version was using Oracle's Java 8 and Windows version using Java 9. With Java 11, Oracle's Java is under a commercial license. We therefore moved to the open source "Open JDK 11", which should be working as well by now.
  • Remembers width of folder property panel if "Remember last window position and size" is checked under Preferences
  • All versions has reduced footprint due to removal of unneeded Java code
  • Default video resolution for generated videos bumped from 480p to 720p
  • Now capable of correctly importing incorrectly written Windows comments and titles
  • Rewritten Mac file chooser integration (runs on Java 9+)
  • Embedded browser now accepts all certificates (avoids certificate related errors)
  • Moved "Clear project list" to top and added confirmation dialog
  • Updated bundled Tiger, Zigzag and Minimal skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed Location editor (updated to newer Google Map APIs
  • Projects zipped on Windows could only be unzipped on Windows
  • Improved rendering of cropped images in Edit mode
  • Fixed problem when skin hints were ignored when switching to same-family skins when no project is open
  • The crop focus plugin didn't respect custom theme image ratios
  • Explore view would incorrectly scroll to the top then objects were added via file selector
  • Fixed bug in project importer. Wouldn't handle albums with more than 2 folder levels
  • Various bug fixes
  • Would throw IOException when generating albums made purely of non re-encoded videos
  • Hopefully fixed issue where recent project list could get cleared accidentally

New in JAlbum 16.2 (Aug 23, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "Adjust camera date" function to correct the camera date (EXIF date) of images (available by right clicking items). Select multiple items to batch-adjust dates.
  • File duplicate support: Select an item or items (image, video, folder) and select "Copy" followed by "Paste" to have the selected items duplicated
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger and Photoblogger
  • Developers: API adjustment to allow plugins to invalidate the metadata cache of album objects
  • Refactored-out old code
  • Bug fixes:
  • "Smart upload" could sometimes turn into "Upload all"
  • Videos could not be rotated
  • .thm files (thumbnail image files) weren't addable through the user interface

New in JAlbum 16.1 (Jul 6, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • New "Mirror content" linking behaviour allowing complete separation of jAlbum project files and your images without having to duplicate files.
  • Updated bundled PhotoBlogger and Zigzag skins
  • Improved error diagnostics
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed rare crash condition triggered when connecting to remote servers
  • The location editor wouldn't work for some v16 users
  • Fix for nullpointer exception thrown when clicking project root node while editing sub folder name
  • jAlbum could hang when closing certain album projects that relies on the theme image selector
  • The embedded editor could hang if the printing system of the computer wasn't configured right
  • Fixes for compatibility with skins using the JSONMaker API

New in JAlbum 16 (Jun 11, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • New cleaner project file format. jAlbum's project control files are no longer scattered among your images but neatly tucked under hidden ".jalbum" folders. jAlbum will upgrade projects to new format automatically. (Use this conversion tool if you ever need to open projects in older versions of jAlbum)
  • Now allows any image file, (not just album objects) to be dropped onto the selectors of the folder property panel.
  • More robust image reading. Now handles for instance broken Samsung Galaxy S7 panoramic images too
  • More informative error messages if connecting to ftp servers fails
  • Displays camera date in info tool-tip when hovering mouse over objects
  • jAlbum now provide much faster search in Tiger skin, especially for large albums by using one centralized JSON database instead of one database per folder.
  • jAlbum's theme image selector now allows cropping. Currently supported by Zigzag skin
  • New tool to zip project files (Tools->External tools->Zip project file)
  • Users can now control video quality and scaling while being in advanced mode
  • Advanced video settings now allows multiple parameters with same name. This simplifies applying logos on top of videos for instance
  • Developers: Now produces pretty printed JSON data files if logging level is set to FINE or higher
  • Developers: New IO.zip API
  • Developers: New SmartProgressMonitor API
  • Developers: Updated JSON library to json-simple3.0.2
  • Swedish, English, German, French, Dutch, Korean, Hungarian and Turkish translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Hitting preview when preview window had been iconified wouldn't de-iconify window
  • Fixed occasional hang when failing to connect to servers (Mac)
  • Opening embedded editor when no project is loaded would produce an error
  • Improved parsing of GPS coordinates to handle oddly formatted coordinates
  • Albums made with flatten, alphabetical or date structure (Settings->Structure) would include excluded objects too
  • Unselected nodes of folder tree collapsed when moving files between folders
  • Broken folder links weren't showing in Explorer view making them hard to detect and repair
  • Various bug fixes to internal APIs

New in JAlbum 15.4 (May 6, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • The preview browser now runs in a separate window. (One can optionally switch it back to integrated/embedded mode). The advantages of using a separate window is that you can use a larger window for previews without having to expand the jAlbum window. You can also easily play with various screen sizes to better adapt galleries for various devices (see new "Responsive" button in preview browser's toolbar when running in windowed mode). The "Windowed" preview mode is more like using an external browser for previews, but with the advantages of responding better to skin, style and settings changes within jAlbum.
  • Main user interface updated to be more streamlined and intuitive: View mode buttons now left-aligned and community related buttons moved to the top-right corner.
  • New project button ("+") added next to project list.
  • Made JSON metadata generator more flexible by allowing callback hooks
  • Bundled the new Zigzag skin
  • Updated bundled Tiger and Turtle skins
  • Made browser action buttons translatable
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum sharing wouldn't save share settings (since 14.1)
  • Used cached thumbnail within jAlbum even if target image was updated
  • Made metadata parsing more robust
  • Fixed bug in iterator element causing incorrect object inclusion in certain situations (since 15.3)
  • Fixed incorrect thumbWidth and thumbHeight variables for representing folder thumbnails when image has been cropped
  • Fixed pricing link not showing when license missing and signed in
  • Fix for missing characters in some asian languages

New in JAlbum 15.3.4 (Apr 5, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • New user interface setting to generate JSON files no matter what skin is used (Settings-Advanced-Metadata). This setting has been added to support a new Wordpress integration we're about to release
  • jAlbum now has an improved "expression language" syntax enabling skin developers to use expressions like ${first|second|third} causing the first non-empty variable to be picked. This syntax also accepts default strings: ${aperture:"Missing aperture"}
  • Usability improvement: Added the default smart "Make Album" as the 1:st menu item of jAlbum's Make album context menu.
  • Updated bundled skins Tiger and PhotoBlogger
  • Updated Slovenian translation
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed an issue with the representing thumbnail for folders having wrong "thumbWith" and "thumbHeight" variables if the target image is cropped in jAlbum, thereby distorting the aspect ratio of such thumbnails.

New in JAlbum 15.3.2 (Mar 17, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • Developers: the ja:if category test tag now accepts a comma separated list of categories, for instance ...
  • Updated bundled Tiger skin to v1.8.1
  • Bug fixes:
  • Developers: Fixed incorrect line number references and error messages for many script related errors (BeanShell scripting)
  • Some images generated from Nexus tablets caused errors (unable to interpret shutter speed)

New in JAlbum 15.3 (Mar 9, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum's Explore view now allows ratings and flags to be set via context menu
  • Developers: new ja:iterator element that also iterates over hidden objects and custom pages, otherwise same behavior as ja:fileiterator
  • Folders may now have description text (set under folder properties) that differ from the folder comment. Skins can specify separateDescription=true in skin.properties to activate this
  • Engine now produces slide images for representing folder images as well and not just thumbnails
  • Updated Turkish and Finnish translations. Thank you dear translators.
  • Bug fixes:
  • imagePath on index.htt would point to thumbnails instead of slide images
  • Fixed bug in print support (printing.inc)

New in JAlbum 15.2 (Feb 14, 2018)

  • News and Updates:
  • Introducing a new notion: Web directory. The Web directory is a global preference which can point out the root of a local web structure where to put album folders by default. jAlbum can now be instructed to either put new projects in an "album" sub folder of the project folder (still the default) or in a folder under the new web directory.
  • jAlbum's recent project list now finally displays the name of the project file instead of the containing folder's name if the project name isn't the default name (jalbum-settings.jap). This allows project files to be located under the same folder without ending up in a long list of the same folder name printed. Renaming an entry under "Recent projects" will rename the project file instead of renaming the project/image folder in case the project name isn't the default (jalbum-settings.jap). Use "File->Save project settings as" or Explorer/Finder to make the initial project name change.
  • Web locations may now use relative as well as absolute URLs
  • Slight performance enhancement to album making
  • No longer switches to newly installed skin (may cause unwanted changes to open projects)
  • Bundled with updated Java 9.0.4 (Windows + Linux)
  • Installed size reduced with 70MB (pruned unneeded code from bundled Java)
  • Developers: The StateMonitor can now monitor changes to the music play list component too
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing blank full screen review view mode under OS X High Sierra
  • Fix to unwanted regeneration of images
  • Wouldn't properly show license expired message
  • User variables weren't picked up from folders
  • If copying files where source file was missing, would delete destination file instead of signalling an error (since introduction of hard links)
  • Fixed rare nullpointer bug during album build

New in JAlbum 15.1 (Dec 20, 2017)

  • News and Updates:
  • Support for MPEG-4 audio file added (.m4a extension).
  • Internal music player updated to play both m4a, wav and mp3 files.
  • Defaults can now be stored and applied on a per-skin basis. See "File->Save as Skin Default"
  • Cut+Paste support added. This mimics the Cut+Paste behavior in Windows Explorer and facilitates moving album objects around. Just select some album objects to move, hit CMD/CTRL+X, go to the destination folder and location and hit CMD/CTRL+V to paste the objects. The objects will be pasted close to the mouse pointer location. This feature will probably be appreciated by those who organize huge albums and feel uneasy with dragging and dropping and the scrolling it usually involves.
  • Updated bundled Minimal and Tiger skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to "directory already exists" error during ftp upload
  • IPTC keywords weren't imported properly if they were semicolon separated

New in JAlbum 15 (Nov 19, 2017)

  • News and Updates:
  • New 30 trial days for everyone! Free update for anyone having a current support and update plan or active Premium or Power subscription. Discounted updates for users with older licenses. (See status under Help->"About jAlbum" inside software or on your jalbum.net profile page.)
  • Supports 360° images (Tiger skin + new property panel under Edit while editing 360° images)
  • Supports hard links! Drastically (20 times) reduces size of album folders by using hard links for original images and resource files (Toggle under Preferences->Album)
  • New JPEG reading code capable of properly handling several odd JPEG variants and color profiles. (TwelveMonkeys)
  • Now offering four new extra high quality image scaling algorithms: "Blackman-Bessel", "Blackman-Sinc", "Lanczos" and "Mitchell". jAlbum's image scaling should now match the best alternatives in the industry. See Settings->Images. Credit to TwelveMonkeys for these.
  • New folder property panel allowing quick and intuitive selection of folder specific titles, descriptions thumbnail images and theme images as well as allowing easy selection of theme image crop focus.
  • Theme images may now be selected separately from representing folder images. (Updated Tiger skin demonstrates this, and more skins will follow)
  • The whole code base, including all extensions, refactored to use Java 8 features and more performant constructs. The result should be slight performance enhancements, including somewhat lower startup time
  • Easier to use backups: Now generates "lifeboat" file to album folder during Make album instead of during publishing (toggle under Preferences->Album). This enables users to retrieve backups from published albums even if they were uploaded with 3:rd party ftp tools.
  • Removed ability to include hi-res images (doesn't seem to be used)
  • Smoother looking splash screen :-)
  • Bundled with updated Tiger skin supporting separate theme images, among other improvements
  • Allows adding web locations requiring basic http authentication too
  • Windows and Linux versions bundled with latest Java 9.0.1
  • Mac version bundled with updated Java 8u152
  • Updated languages. Thank you dear translators. Missing your language? Contact us!
  • Developers: JDraggableList now supports static lists too
  • Developers. New APIs for adding theme images to your skins.
  • Developers: New "projectionType" variable available (in json format too) to identify 360° images
  • Old code solutions factored out
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed user interface scaling issue for hidpi screens causing too small user interface controls (Windows).
  • Videos larger than screen size couldn't be edited (Windows only)
  • The preview didn't always render the full web page on initial display
  • Web root verification failed for servers that redirects between protocols
  • Fix to "IllegalStateException" being thrown on occasion when using the clipboard
  • Clearing xmp coordinates now properly imports backing GPS coordinates again
  • Didn't handle xmp based GPS coordinates expressed in deg,min,sec format
  • "Verify web root" didn't work for ftp servers that redirected between protocols
  • Various minor robustness fixes

New in JAlbum 14.1 (Aug 7, 2017)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum's uploader now allows multiple file selection. Facilitates batch deletion greatly
  • jAlbum's text editor improved with better character encoding detection and support for loading and saving with explicitly stated encodings
  • jAlbum's database import tool now supports importing from xml based image metadata databases as well as csv files
  • Bundled Tiger skin updated to v1.3
  • New "Cache image ordering" external tool that greatly speeds up album builds on albums ordered by camera date
  • Robustness improvements to database import tool.
  • Bundled Java updated to v1.8.0_144
  • Updated Slovak translation
  • Developers: New JFormattedComboBox component that allows presentation of combo box data in various formatted ways, for instance percentage format.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed startup crash caused by Windows 10 Creators Update (affected Windows look and feel only)
  • Fixed broken error window if jAlbum fails to start
  • Fix issue preventing jAlbum from starting if clipboard was in an illegal state (caused by some 3:rd party clipboard management software)
  • Developers: JComboBoxes having numbers as model wouldn't update correctly when loading projects
  • Developers: The thumb.path variable for the current folder of JSON files incorrectly included the current folder itself

New in JAlbum 14.0.5 (Jul 10, 2017)

  • News and Updates:
  • Dutch and Hungarian translations updated
  • Bundled Tiger skin updated
  • Bug fixes:
  • File dialog on Windows wouldn't remember the initial path causing tedious folder tree walking
  • Web locations not working when making albums offline
  • Fixed broken "Import database file" tool
  • Fixed rare ArrayIndexOutOfBounds exception in 3:rd party Apache-Sanselan library (responsible for updating xmp metadata in JPEG images)
  • jAlbum wouldn't allow two web locations with the same target html page title in the same folder (file name generation clash)
  • jAlbum would halt on broken GPS coordinates (relates to images processed by PaintShopPro)
  • Missing Edit icon
  • Missing closeup image for Web Locations if "makeWebLocationSlides" is set to false (affects Tiger skin)
  • The alternative lauch .cmd files for Windows required Java 9
  • Improved error recovery when failing to update xmp metadata (now same robust behavior as in jAlbum 13)
  • Fixed nullpointer exception when processing album.rss file for images lacking camera model specification

New in JAlbum 14.0 (Jun 23, 2017)

  • News and Updates:
  • Introducing the new and fully responsive "Tiger" skin that's intended to replace Turtle
  • New stylish dark user interface look - Darcula. (If you prefer the old look, change back under Preferences)
  • New album object type: "Web locations". Web locations are objects that can refer to any web page, not just local ones. This opens for some really interesting new applications for jAlbum. See for example this album collecting popular TED talks on YouTube.
  • To add a "Web location" to your album, drop the web page onto jAlbum or select New page->Web location. Why not use this feature to make a master album out of existing albums?
  • Bundled skins "Minimal", "Base", "PhotoBlogger", "Turtle" and the new "Tiger" skin now supports Web Locations.
  • jAlbum now has integrated GoogleMaps location tagging, see Edit->Location
  • jAlbum can now automatically embed xmp based copyright notices on all images (Settings->Images)
  • Better integration with external editors, for instance PhotoShop (alt-double click to export to choosen editor)
  • jAlbum's Text effect (Settings->Effects->Text) now supports background color
  • New importer to import metadata from various database backed photo management systems (see Add->From database file)
  • Batch rename now supports regular expressions (select several album objects and select rename to launch batch rename tool)
  • Adapted for Java 9
  • "Skin family" mechanism allowing skins belonging to the same family to share the same project settings. This simplifies moving from one skin to another without having to re-enter the same settings. This applies when moving from Turtle to the new Tiger skin for instance. Just open an existing Turtle project and switch to Tiger, then make the album again. ("Skin family" is a skin property)
  • Developers: New "include" and "exclude" attribute to ja:fileiterator element allowing a comma separated list of categories to be included or excluded, for instance
  • Developers: New "category" attribute for ja:if element, simplifying testing on categories, for instance: . Please replace with for better future compatibility.
  • Bundled with updated Java 8u131
  • Developers: new JDraggableList component allowing skin user interfaces to allow end user to arrange objects by drag and drop
  • Reverted to again presenting "extensions" directly under jAlbum's context menu. (Deleted rotate items for sake of space - available in the toolbar)
  • Translations for major languages updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum wouldn't start up properly on some recently updated Windows 10 systems
  • Fixed error importing settings from albums published on https: URLs
  • Improved handling of some malformatted JPEG images
  • Native Mac file chooser didn't respect initial directory
  • Fixed missing lock icon for password protected albums for accounts having more than 10 albums
  • Fixed line number calculation error if line number info is missing
  • Group by place now also respects xmp based GPS coordinates
  • Fix for WOFF font rendering for internal web browser (Mac)
  • Polished UI for Darcula
  • Fixed color error on Nimbus look & feel

New in JAlbum 13.10 (Jan 30, 2017)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum can now link straight from thumbnails to the original version of an image file for individual images. This is convenient when mixing ordinary JPEG images and animated GIF images for instance.
  • Bundled with updated Turtle skin 5.5.15
  • Bug fixes:
  • If closed in iconified state, jAlbum would open in iconified state, sometimes not permitting its main window to open. jAlbum now either opens in normal, maximized or full screen state
  • The Arty effects wouldn't process some JPEG images and other file formats
  • On rare occasions, the embedded web browser wouldn't respond, causing jAlbum's user interface to freeze. Now, jAlbum releases the user interface after a 10 second timeout if this browser unresponsiveness occurs again.
  • jAlbum's embedded text editor would sometimes not open files correctly, instead generating error messages to the system console

New in JAlbum 13.9 (Jan 12, 2017)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum's organizer can now also group files by keywords
  • New "price" variable and data entry field (under Edit->Description) to simplify setting price-per-item
  • Bundled Turtle skin updated to v5.5.13
  • Now automatically closes skin update notifications when downloading skin updates
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed skin installation bug causing some newly installed skins to fail loading (manifests only on 1:st skin loading when going from bundled to installed skin and for skins having compiled code)
  • Fixed missing error cause, hiding errors occuring in compiled code
  • Fixed concurrency issue causing various errors in ssh library
  • Aborting ftp/sftp connection attempts is now more solid
  • Local preview on Linux didn't respect the default browser if the path contained characters that needed to be URL encoded
  • Fix to https based rss feeds (broken "absoluteURL")
  • Fix to disabling of make album button during skin loading (wasn't disabling from UI thread)
  • The logo and text effects wouldn't respect HiDPI if applied to thumbnails

New in JAlbum 13.8 (Dec 22, 2016)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated editor with code folding and several bug fixes
  • Updated 3:rd party ftp and sftp upload libraries to improve upload compatibility and stability
  • Better integration between jAlbum and editor. Hit the "Edit" button when skin errors occur to be taken to the relevant file and line and see the error highlighted
  • Improved error reporting. Line number reporting improved
  • Polished Darcula look and feel for Windows (Toolbar buttons and slider knob)
  • Closes progress dialog prior to opening error dialog on make album error
  • Closes skin error dialogue when clicking edit
  • Editor also respects Darcula look and feel
  • Includes updated Turtle and PhotoBlogger skins. (Earlier Turtle skin could cause jAlbum to crash on Windows)
  • Added warning icons for too small source images (with HiDPI images selected)
  • Polished notifications for Darcula look and feel
  • Developers: Added file extension filter support to JFileSelector component
  • Minor improvements to HiDPI support for Text-, Logo- and XBorderFilter
  • Embedded editor now uses the OS native file choosers
  • Bug fixes:
  • Current HiDPI project settings would be inherited when loading old album projects
  • jAlbum could incorrectly warn about saving changes when closing album projects even if no changes had been made
  • Chained directories logic fixed (could produce some truly confusing linking earlier)
  • Fixed broken Facebook importer and bad looking Facebook icon (for Darcula look)
  • Fix for remembering maximized and full screen state
  • "Upload all" was only uploading changes
  • Fix for full screen bug (Went full screen sometimes even when it shouldn't)
  • The superimposed play icon for video thumbnails got smaller with HiDPI mode
  • Mac file chooser causing nullpointer exception for null directories
  • The Preview view mode didn't get activated when setting Image directory for an empty project

New in JAlbum 13.7 (Nov 26, 2016)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum's user interface is now also available in a stylish dark theme ("Darcula" look and feel"). Select it from jAlbum Preferences. Note, only available for Pro and Power users.
  • Added support for HiDPI images in generated albums (see Settings->Images). This makes images look sharper on HiDPI screens such as modern mobile devices. Compare these normal-dpi and HiDPI albums
  • Album objects may now be copied and pasted. Even works between album projects
  • Updated user interface icons
  • Updated embedded Turtle skin
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed issue preventing using symbolic links as album folder

New in JAlbum 13.6 (Oct 28, 2016)

  • News and Updates:
  • You can now drag and drop images and folders FROM jAlbum to other programs, just like you've been able to drag and drop TO jAlbum. This facilitates working with supporting programs like image editors and book making software.
  • New "batch make album tool" to facilitate the remaking of several album projects in one go
  • jAlbum's file organizing tools moved from View->Organize to the top menu bar (really not view options as they relocate files and folders)
  • Developers: jAlbum's template parser is now more strict, catching more syntactical errors
  • Developers: jAlbum's template parser now reports file and line number for errors to assist in debugging
  • jAlbum's Print plugin improved and embedded into jAlbum. It's thereby available under File->Print as well as on the context menu. The Print feature can now also print image dimensions.
  • Slight performance enhancement to template parser
  • Bundled skins Turtle and Photoblogger updated
  • Developers: You can now use Icons.get() to read SVG icons for your skins
  • Updated English, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian and Korean translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Removed outdated "Alloy" look and feel
  • Bug fixes:
  • The color picker for web based skin user interfaces didn't respond to clicks (Java bug, fixed in u112 release)
  • Developers: jAlbum's generated JSON data contained duplicates of inherited user variables. New JSON data is now more compact

New in JAlbum 13.5 (Sep 30, 2016)

  • News and Updates:
  • The thumbnails in jAlbum's Explore view are now zoomable. Zoom out to any extent to gain overview while arranging objects, zoom in to see details.
  • The thumbnails in jAlbum's Explore view are now rendered in high resolution on HiDPI (Retina) screens
  • Now automatically pops up upload/manage dialog on authentication errors while uploading.
  • Developers: Added "clipLength" variable to conveniently present video length
  • Now using HiDPI (retina) icons for the buttons of the video player user interface too
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators
  • Developers: JSON data now includes "thumb" node for root folder too, making finding the representing thumbnail for an album easier.
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum would not always suggest a sub folder to upload to when uploading to one's own ftp server

New in JAlbum 13.4 (Aug 26, 2016)

  • News and Updates:
  • Skins can now be developed using web technologies only (html+css+javascript). No need for any Java or BeanShell knowledge in order to create the settings user interface of a skin. Just add a "ui.html" file to the skin's folder and jAlbum will pick up the named variables from the html form of that html file.
  • Skin developers may now also use JavaFX technology to design skin user interfaces with minimum coding efforts using Scene Builder. The visual layout is stored in a FXML file ("ui.fxml"). The needed logic can be added in JavaScript using an "onload.js" file.
  • External tools can now be written in any language supported by the underlying Java engine, for instance JavaScript. (Use ".js" file extension)
  • The embedded video editor now also supports .mov containers as well as .mp4
  • The ordering of files is now unaffected when adding files by drag and drop (was earlier automatically set to "custom")
  • Holding down SHIFT or ALT while accessing View->Update will also cause thumbnail cache to be cleared
  • Added contextual menus to caption editor for jAlbum's Explore view
  • Updated French and German languages. Thank you dear translators
  • Bundled with updated Java 8 (1.8.0_102)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug in the Publish window causing the parent folder of a deleted child object to not be selected
  • The percentage indicator when processing clipped/truncated videos was incorrect

New in JAlbum 13.3 (Jul 6, 2016)

  • News and Updates:
  • New embedded video player and improved video editor, just double click .mp4 videos to launch it.
  • Added "digitizedDate" variable
  • One can now use the right mouse button while editing captions, titles and filenames to get a popup context menu
  • Supports JavaFX based skin user interfaces too
  • Supports the current version of the ffmpeg video processor
  • Updated embedded skins Turtle and Fully. Fully now supports video and larger folder structures
  • "Paste filters" now avoids overwriting existing filters applied to target objects
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed startup error preventing start of jAlbum when certain kind of data was present on the clipboard

New in JAlbum 13.2 (May 18, 2016)

  • News and Updates:
  • Multiple files and folders can now be renamed in one go. (Select target album objects, right click and select "Rename N items")
  • Stability rewrites to upload handler
  • Hovering the mouse over album objects now presents a "More" button that presents available options, instead of presenting the Edit option. Double click images to quickly edit them. (This change was made to make novice users aware of context menus)
  • More operations are now made undoable
  • Updated Turtle and Minimal skins
  • Bundled with updated 64 bit Java engine (1.8.0_92-b14)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to hanging when aborting ftp connect attempts
  • jAlbum would halt on processing RAW files if "Include metadata in generated images" was checked
  • "Repair link" didn't allow repairing broken folder links
  • Some portrait oriented Nikon RAW images were incorrectly stretched
  • Some JPEG images had their colors distorted to cyan-magenta hues. This applied to JPEG images using a RGB color space instead of a YCbCr color space (Note: Don't confuse this with color profiles)
  • "Repair link" didn't position the file chooser in the nearest existing target folder
  • The representing folder thumbnail wasn't updated when adding or removing files from within it
  • More robust closing of IO resources after completed IO operations

New in JAlbum 13.1 (Mar 22, 2016)

  • News and updates:
  • Supports fast reading of 38 RAW file formats. See new "RAW" settings panel when editing images.
  • Icons are rendered in hiDPI on retina displays (vector based instead of bitmap based)
  • Mac version now plays mp4 videos from the embedded browser too
  • Updated skins, and bundled with recently released Responsive skin
  • Improved error reporting for fatal errors
  • All installers (including Linux) are now bundled with latest Java 8 (1.8.0_u74)
  • The space key now serves as shortcut to open the currently selected image in full screen review mode
  • Developers: Added "widgetJavaScript" variable to enable widget support in skins that rely on JavaScript instead of iframe for embedding
  • The progress dialog shown during album making is now resizable
  • Bug fixes:
  • Skin loading could crash with a ClassNotFound exception
  • The text filter and Text effect did not accept the $ sign (was reserved for marking variables only)
  • jAlbum would freeze if trying to move a linked folder to within itself
  • Changes made to variables during album making was not always respected
  • Videos flagged with "Do not re-encode" would end up in the root of the album folder instead of under "slides"
  • Videos marked with "Do not re-encode" were missing the videoWidth and videoHeight variables
  • jAlbum would crash when previewing albums on some computers (bug in earlier embedded Java)
  • Some languages did not have the "undo"/"redo" words translated

New in JAlbum 13.0 (Oct 28, 2015)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum 13 comes with a new free 30 day trial for all users! Free update for all who have an active support & update plan. (Install next to existing version to safely evaluate the improvements)
  • Support for collaborative albums (albums where several people contribute with images). Have images mailed to [email protected] automatically appear in collaborative album projects
  • Organize your images easily in folders based on camera date, place etc. Have duplicates deleted. See View->Organize
  • jAlbum's Explore view now has multiple level undo & redo for many operations (move, rename etc)
  • Control folder structure of generated albums independent of how source images are organized (See Settings->Structure)
  • New embedded browser component ("WebView" based on WebKit) for preview view mode, capable of playing mp4 videos natively. Currently available on Windows and Linux versions only
  • Windows version comes as 64 bit app by default
  • Native file choosers are now used everywhere
  • Updated Arty filter sporting three new artistic filters and improved performance
  • Developers: New JSONMaker API to significantly simplify JavaScript based skin development
  • Responsive skin "PhotoBlogger" now bundled
  • Processed videos now go inside "slides" sub folder
  • Updated bundled Turtle, Base and Minimal skins
  • Developers: New "videoPath" variable. JSpinner controls may now have Strings and Doubles too.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed potential UI freeze when loading broken skins
  • Fixed nullpointer exception during file copying
  • More robust handling of camera metadata
  • Fixed bug stopping album making when errors in video processing occured
  • Fixed bug causing cursor key navigation to fail when navigating objects of different height
  • Deleted objects weren't put in the recycle bin when running on 64 bit Java engine

New in JAlbum 12.7 (Jun 1, 2015)

  • News and Updates:
  • Supports 3-digit hex colors too (#ABC meaning #AABBC)
  • Developers: Added setWhenAdded to jAlbum's AlbumObject API
  • Native Mac file chooser now also supports filtering on file types
  • Added a "Thread dump" button to jAlbum's system console window to ease debugging
  • Developers: Made layoutHints property available via Config API
  • Updated bundled skins Turtle, Base and Fully
  • Updated German and Dutch translations. Thank you translators!
  • Refactored out old code
  • Bug fixes:
  • Updating some skins on Windows (Turtle for instance) caused file locked warnings
  • Newly added videos couldn't be edited (clip start/stop and representing thumbnail)
  • Fixed bug causing remote directory to be set to another project's remote directory setting when switching projects while upload window is still open
  • Moving between images in edit mode was slow due to non functioning image cacheing
  • Fixed bug causing nullpointer exception on some image tools
  • "Save copy as" could generate images with inconsistent orientation information thereby causing images to be presented sideways

New in JAlbum 12.6.4 (Apr 27, 2015)

  • News and Updates:
  • Remembers last used folder for adding pictures instead of always starting at "My Pictures"
  • New "Server mode tool" that also uploads album after album has been made
  • Windows and Mac versions bundled with latest Java (1.8.0_45)
  • Developers: Variables can now be added programatically to the generated json files on album make time
  • Windows version packaged with updated installer builder
  • Bug fixes:
  • RSS feed generation could break with certain date formats

New in JAlbum 12.6 (Mar 25, 2015)

  • News and Updates:
  • Free update for all jAlbum 12 license holders
  • Significantly faster image tools (Levels, Gamma, AutoCorrect and Arty)
  • Text and Logo image effects now supports tiling. This addition makes it easier to apply subtile watermarks across your whole images in order to protect them from being copied
  • Improved keyword management. Easier to add keywords to multiple images.
  • Minimal skin updated. Now supports keyboard navigation
  • Bug fixes:
  • Red Eye filter didn't work (still doesn't work in Explore view, but works in final albums and in edit mode)

New in JAlbum 12.5 (Feb 17, 2015)

  • News and Updates:
  • Free update for all jAlbum 12 license holders
  • Supports upcoming licenses with 12 months support & update plan
  • Performance improvements to ftp uploader (less verbose communication)
  • Deleting albums from ftp servers (not ours) is now faster due to use of multiple connections.
  • Uploads to external ftp servers now kicks off faster. The initial delay when the UI was frozen has now been replaced by an instant dialogue with progress spinners and the ability to cancel.
  • Built-in watchdog that triggers the generation of a "thread-dump.txt" file and attempts to unlock the UI if the UI ever hangs for more than 20 sec. (Disabled by default. Enable under Preferences->Advanced)
  • Some improvements to the ftp4j ftp client library
  • "Print selected" plugin improved to support multi line captions and also print videos and folders
  • Developers: API change: AlbumObject.loadImage() now also loads images for videos (the representing image)
  • Several languages updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix for the long standing issue with excluded files reappearing again
  • Fix to allow https based web root URLs
  • The thumbnail image for folders having portrait oriented representing images could sometimes get an incorrect aspect ratio
  • If "Include photographic data in generated images" was checked, some images taken with portrait orientation would be presented sideways on some browsers (iPad's browser for instance)
  • Developers: jAlbum's JAlbumUtilities.countCategories() method should have ignored hidden folders but didn't

New in JAlbum 12.4 (Jan 14, 2015)

  • News and updates:
  • Consumes far less RAM memory when making large albums
  • Font size for jAlbum's user interface now configurable under Preferences
  • Added order by file type (category)
  • Improved error logging
  • Facebook uploader tool now remembers last used window size
  • Reordered album tags and album description and removed warning for using more than 4 album tags
  • Updated Turtle and Minimal skins

New in JAlbum 12.3.5 (Dec 13, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • Embedded web browser updated. Support of Mac OS X 10.10 and Debian 7.7 32-bit and 64-bit has been added apart from engine enhancements and bug fixes.
  • Selecting "Embed" from a project context menu will again display the embed code in a separate window
  • Upload window: Clicking on another server folder will cancel (instead of commit) any ongoing rename or folder creation operation. Hit Enter or Upload to commit such operations.
  • French translation updated.
  • Bug fixes:
  • The Make album button became grayed out after displaying embed code (displaying the share panel for instance)
  • Fixed rare bug causing deletion of wrong album folder from server when deleting album project (only triggered by a rare sequence of circumstances)
  • Wasn't starting up on Java 7
  • Fixed concurrency issue when logging to system console
  • Bug fixes to Facebook importer

New in JAlbum 12.3 (Dec 1, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • 30 more trial days for those of you who've tried earlier releases but still not have a v12 license
  • All windows and panels now feature context sensitive help (F1 or clicking "?" button)
  • New Facebook importer, see "Add" button
  • Uploads are now more robust than ever. Uploader routines and libraries updated
  • Skin developers: JavaScript as scripting language added to album engine. You can now script skins in either BeanShell (interpreted Java) or JavaScript.
  • Enables individual images to be excluded from image effects
  • Updated image crop tool. Now for instance remembers last used aspect ratio
  • Prevents users from accidentally overwriting web files when uploading albums
  • Size of recent project menu is now configurable
  • Updated Share panel with embed code embedded into panel
  • Bundled with updated Turtle and Base skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum couldn't handle images fed directly from a drive root ("F:\" for instance)
  • Videos having non squary pixels weren't presented with the correct aspect ratio

New in JAlbum 12.2.4 (Oct 23, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • Defaults to opening final album in external web browser after publishing album
  • Increased font size on caption editor of edit view
  • About window now contains information on Java version and number of bits (32 vs 64)
  • Updated internal web browser (jxBrowser 4.6)
  • Updated embedded Java engine (1.8.0_25)
  • Mac version is now bundled with Java 1.8 by default instead of relying on Apple's old Java 6
  • Bug fixes:
  • Renaming recently created folders would sometimes make the folder non-openable
  • Toggling file exclusion didn't always take
  • Certain URLs (those containing spaces for instance) couldn't be opened in external browser

New in JAlbum 12.2 (Sep 18, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • New full screen slide show, simplifying the process of approving images
  • Zoom support added to edit panel
  • Sub directories can now be chained, simplifying sequential navigation through large album trees (see Advanced->General). This feature defaults to off
  • Improved reading of TIFF and JPEG 2000 files
  • Displays time info when dragging clip and thumbnail sliders for videos
  • Windows version bundled with latest Java 8 engine (1.8.0_20)
  • More solid parsing of various video formats
  • Performance enhancement: Better cacheing of image size calculations
  • Developers: Updated JSON API now including image specific metadata. Developing Javscript based skins now easier than before
  • The whenAddedDate now corresponds to when an album object has been added to an album, and not to an album project. This also gives less eager creation of albumfiles.txt files.
  • The address bar of the internal browser now has a context menu
  • Bundled skin Minimal now uses HTML5 instead of tables. Thanks jGromit for this one.
  • Various minor improvements
  • Added experimental JavaScript support to console window
  • Updated bundled Turtle skin to v5.1.3
  • Bug fixes:
  • Several bug fixes, for instance to uploader (more robust reconnects)
  • Full HD video resolution resulted in 720p instead of 1080p
  • Fixed ugly rendering of style selector for styles with long names
  • Fixed problem previewing network mounted albums in external browser
  • Reopening an alreadty running jAlbum on Mac by clicking the dock icon would restore maximized window to normal state

New in JAlbum 12.1.9 (Jun 17, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • The new "Crop focus" plugin is now bundled, allowing easy positioning of auto-cropped areas
  • If a tool or plugin exists both as bundled and manually installed, jAlbum will always use the latest version (the one having the most recent last modified date)
  • Added warning icons when using excessive image- and video quality settings
  • Updated "ftp4j" ftp library to version 1.7.1
  • Improved error diagnostics
  • Bundled updated Turtle 5.1.1 skin
  • Updated French and Brazilian Portuguese translation
  • Bug fixes:
  • Internal browser updated to v4.4, now with a host of improvements
  • Re-editing text using the Text effect under edit mode didn't work
  • The buttons of the Download user interface were missing text and icons

New in JAlbum 12.1.8 (May 15, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • Skin info window now also displays physical location on hard disk
  • Developers: The AlbumImage.applyFilter API now passes variables bound to the corresponding album object if the AlbumImage was created with an AlbumObject as parameter
  • Developers: The CropFilter and FixedShapeFilter can now accept custom per-image crop regions (passed via user variables)
  • Updated bundled skins "Turtle" and "Fully"
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing image corruption on certain images when editing recently edited captions (Since 11.6)
  • "Make changes" is now respected again (i.e. images are only reprocessed if they are missing in the output directory or if individual images have been updated)
  • Left, then right clicking an album object quickly on Mac would accidentally open it for editing
  • Fixed occasional error about "not being in pause state" during album upload
  • Embedded browser preview now works with password protected pages too

New in JAlbum 12.1 (Apr 29, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • This update is free for all jAlbum 12 license holders
  • Improved printing support for printing multi-image contact sheets. (Right click thumbnail images and select "Print selected...")
  • Easier to locate lost projects: Offers to open existing project when name of new project collides with existing project
  • Mac version now supports retina displays. (Thank you for your help Jan Meyer-Hübner)
  • Supports symbolic links
  • Disables "Preview" view mode if internal browser is switched off
  • jAlbum can now auto-update without requiring to run as Administrator
  • Embedded browser now allows local file access (other file types than html and images)
  • Updated underlying ftp and sftp libraries
  • Language files for several languages updated. Thank you translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Embedded Chromium-based browser now updated to v4.3.1 containing several bug fixes to crash bugs and improved compatibility. Now also supports 64 bit RedHat Linux
  • Image coordinate offset error in edit panel fixed (affected moving control handles)
  • Fixed rotation error when moving between crop and straighten image tools
  • Fix to old bug parsing old-style variables in templates (variables were sometime not expanded)
  • Fixed ClassCastException error when using Synth look and feel
  • jAlbum remade newly made albums one extra time when first flipping to the preview view mode
  • Dropping a project folder onto an already open project would open the dropped project instead of adding the dropped folder to the already opened project (since v10.x)
  • Fixed label type button painting issue
  • Skin info for skins containing spaces in the file name didn't work
  • Skin likes notification kept popping up although dismissed
  • Fix to button texts on trial expired notice

New in JAlbum 12 (Apr 3, 2014)

  • News and Updates:
  • Redesigned user interface, more targeted at professionals and cleaned-up. Read blog post
  • Embedded browser preview (Google Chromium) streamlining the work flow. (Can be switched off under preferences)
  • Auto updates the album preview when playing around with settings when viewing the "Preview" panel. Invites exploration of jAlbum's capabilitites
  • Faster: Avoids reprocessing of already processed images and videos when resuming interrupted album builds
  • Faster: Better file attribute cacheing, minimizing file IO during operation of the user interface and album making
  • More snappy thumbnail painting in user interface, especially over slow network drives
  • New "Effects" settings tab allowing easy and detailed control of album-wide image effects like watermarks/texts, logos, grayscale, auto-correct and arty filters via an easy to use interface. (Effects applies to all images unlike their "Image tools" counterparts). (Advanced users: The chosen effects are synched with the user variables panel)
  • New "Share" panel to simplify sharing albums via different social networks. jAlbum's sharing is now opt-in, i.e. you have to click the frog to share an album with jAlbum followers and in the http://jalbum.net/explore/recent section
  • jAlbum now checks and informs about incorrectly configured ftp account profiles, ensuring that jAlbum can properly generate links to the published albums.
  • Skin information like feature set and support links now available in new skin information window
  • New Notification Center that remembers and presents notifications in a less obtrusive way
  • Now deletes unused slide and original images from album folder, thereby cleaning up albums when playing around with various skins
  • Added "Use as folder thumbnail" toolbar button
  • Added "New page" toolbar button
  • Album object information is now available when hovering the mouse over the new info "i" status icons
  • Speed-up to deleting directories over SAMBA mounted network drives
  • Folders and web pages now follow the same label type view+editing as images instead of being locked to file names. (Hint: Alt-click the name section to rename object)
  • Prints license state on splash screen
  • Skins Mr.Burn5 and Fully now bundled
  • Implemented logging levels
  • Updated texts. Thank you all translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Rewritten change detection. No more spurious "Do you wish to save changes" warnings
  • Fix for broken "Repair all links"
  • Fixed bug causing lost reference to image directories when storing the project file outside of the image directory
  • Null pointer fix to deepLastModified API call
  • Fixed painting bug on some look and feels
  • Fixed bug that prevented switching back to explorer when clicking a folder of the project
  • Various bug fixes

New in JAlbum 11.6.14 (Feb 12, 2014)

  • Reverted caption editor behavior to accept enter for newlines. Now draws focus rectangle to indicate focus
  • Added warning if image and output directory are the same
  • Non JPEG files (videos for instance) now delivers last modified date instead of 0 when asked for Camera date
  • Speed up to loading of jAlbum objects.
  • More user friendly reporting of circular folder reference problems
  • Better naming of internal threads
  • Updates to translations. Thank you translators!
  • Minor code improvements
  • Updated bundled Turtle skin to v5
  • Bug fixes:
  • Didn't handle externally modified xmp metadata (like face tags for instance)
  • Repairing broken links would only render the first repaired object correctly. Now all repaired objects are refreshed properly
  • Nullpointer fix for loading old skin settings onto new UI containing new UI components
  • Fix for respecting current directory on Mac File chooser
  • Occasional paining error fixed
  • Didn't understand old $variable syntax for subclasses of dates and files
  • Uses jAlbum ordering instead of custom ordering if visiting a folder containing an albumfiles.txt file but no meta.properties file
  • Error dialogue didn't properly display a scroller for long stack traces
  • Using a folder to represent another folder didn't render the representing album object icon
  • Nullpointer fix for Mac file chooser
  • Fixed painting issue when using icon instead of text for JLinkLabel component

New in JAlbum 11.6.4 (Dec 3, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated Dutch, Portuguese and Korean translations. Thank you translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum 11.6 could cause loss of original files if generating the album files to the same folder as the image folder and keeping "Copy originals" and "Link to originals" set.

New in JAlbum 11.6.3 (Nov 18, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated Romanian and Hungarian translations. Thank you translators!
  • Links may have relative target paths
  • Added ${buyImageUrl} variable. Exists if images have been published for sale. Skin developers can check for the presense of this variable and simply link to its URL so buyers can purchase the relevant image.
  • Bundled with updated skin Turtle 4.5.3
  • Developers: Now avoids interpreting complex object-type variables like window, explorer and engine when using the old-style $variable syntax. This simplifies using Javascript code that refers to $window without the need to surround such references with elements.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Renaming folders caused inconsistent behavior until window was refreshed (since 11.6)
  • Convert links to copies broken
  • Improved UI updates when titles and keywords change
  • Developers: Corrected IO.resolvePath()
  • Fixed nullpointer bug in renderer thread

New in JAlbum 11.6 (Nov 5, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Significantly faster video editing (selecting representing thumbnail and editing start and stop)
  • Far more responsive user interface when managing images that lack cached thumbnails
  • jAlbum now keeps track of when album objects were added to an album
  • Album objects can now be sorted on "when added" date
  • Hovering the mouse over album objects now display convenient information like type, location on disk, size, date added and date modified
  • Uses less file IO calls. Speeds up operation where slow disks and network disks are involved
  • More memory conservative when scaling huge images (>10000 pixels wide)
  • Significantly faster operation over SAMBA mounted network disks (>600% speed gain)
  • Improved wait cursor handling for long operations
  • The ftp4j connection type now sends keep-alives every 30 seconds to avoid disconnects due to timeout
  • Supports the MPO file format (3D JPEG images)
  • Updated bundled skins Minimal and Turtle
  • Added pricing link next to sign in button for unlicensed, not signed in users
  • Developers: See this forum post for API changes
  • Bug fixes:
  • Rotating images and applying image tools to images didn't refresh the thumbnails in the user interface
  • Fixed problems downloading albums using ftpes, ftps and ftp (ftp4j) connection types (exists method broken)
  • Folders who's names starting with the same letters as the album folder would be ignored
  • Fixed painting error in edit panel
  • Non image album objects could be selected to represent a folder or album
  • Fix for nullpointer error when using upload window when jalbum.net is down
  • More robust startup (doesn't bail out if unknown enum properties are found)
  • Renaming files when only the CaSeInG differs would cause double entries
  • Minor code fixes
  • Prevents "OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" from being displayed as image caption

New in JAlbum 11.5 (Sep 10, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Keywords can now be viewed and edited in thumbnail view
  • One can quickly switch between viewing and editing file names, titles, captions or keywords by right clicking the "label type" indicator in the status bar
  • Uploading albums to the root of the remote host or to any folder containing other folders than album folders is now considerable faster
  • Less nagging: Only warns the first time a user attempts to upload an album to the web root of a server account
  • Bundled "Minimal" skin now updated to use the new video tag (gives an embedded player). Thanks for that one jGromit. Also showcases a simple Google Maps integration
  • Skins may disable thumbnail layout panel by specifying skin property
  • Account profiles can now be renamed
  • The embedded editor now supports the recently added variables "videoWidth", "videoHeight", "videoFPS", "videoDuration", "fileCategory" and "gpsLocation"
  • Minor API improvements
  • When opening files using the embedded editor, the currently open image directory is now the default
  • Developers: Updated plugin API to support adding custom tool bar buttons
  • Developers: Small fixes and improvements to skin properties editor
  • Bundled Turtle skin now updated to 4.4.1
  • Bug fixes:
  • Uploading html files using the protocols "ftps", "ftpes" and "ftp (ftp4j)" would sometimes mangle foreign characters (long standing bug)
  • Could accidentally leave edit view when files in the current folder were being added or modified
  • Fix for painting bug when selecting some album objects
  • Fixed rendering bug in label editor
  • Developers: The AlbumImage API ignored the compressionQuality parameter

New in JAlbum 11.4.1 (Aug 8, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Double clicking template pages that have no embedded user interface will now revert to opening in the embedded text editor.
  • Bundled with updated Turtle 4.3.4 skin (fix for Facebook commenting)
  • Updated Korean translation. Thank you dear translator
  • Bug fixes:
  • Selecting the desired image to represent an album using the General settings panel was broken in 11.4
  • Some images would fail to be processed with a "Missing Huffman code table entry" error if "Include photographic data in generated images" was set.

New in JAlbum 11.4 (Aug 1, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Significantly faster (around 10 times) loading of large album projects and sub folders
  • The user interface images and folders are now always in sync with the backing file system so changes directly to the file system, like added and deleted files are reflected in the user interface.
  • Developers: Custom template pages are now guaranteed to have all variables present during script processing that are present within the element. (Easier for template developers. No need to check for void variables)
  • Bundled with updated Turtle skin 4.3.3
  • Bug fixes:
  • Red eye reduction tool was broken
  • Cancelling an album object move by moving the caret back to the initial position would move the album object(s) to the end.
  • Several minor code fixes

New in JAlbum 11.3 (Jul 8, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Now preloads the recent album projects list with a sample album project that demonstrates making a full portfolio site using jAlbum including sub folders and custom contact and about pages
  • Skins can now provide user interfaces for custom web pages like "About.htt" and "Contact.htt"! This enables end users to customize such pages graphically from within jAlbum's edit mode = no need to display html source code to end users. Give it a try by opening the sample portfolio project and double click "About.htt" or "Contact.htt". (The source code can still be edited by right clicking template pages and selecting "Edit" from the context menu). These user interfaces are declared within elements of the template pages so the skin developer both declares and uses his variables in one convenient location.
  • Added ability to order album objects by title and caption
  • Added ability to view and edit Titles as well as file names and captions from the thumbnail view (See View->"Label type")
  • Label type for thumbnail view (file name, title, caption) now visible and changeable in status bar
  • Creates web-safe file names if non-safe file names are being used without URL-encoding being active. This should ensure less viewing problems for files using characters like %, #, ? and &
  • Minor user interface tweaks
  • Minor code improvements (better naming of CPU threads)
  • More robust reading of camera metadata
  • Recent project list now max 50 instead of 25 files
  • Bundled with updated Turtle 4.3.0 skin
  • Languages updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Better memory management: Better at releasing unused data in situations where memory is low. jAlbum should now be far better at processing huge albums without running into out of memory conditions.
  • Fixed deadlock bug in Widget panel causing the user interface to hang
  • Some Windows systems would experience slow or hanging start up due to misconfigured printer drivers
  • Album projects can now again be opened by simply dropping their folders onto jAlbum
  • Prevents copying a file to itself (thereby rendering the file zero bytes in length)
  • The state of custom UIs wasn't saved when making the album
  • Handles broken manifest.jmf files on upload = more robust uploads on shaky network connections

New in JAlbum 11.2.5 (May 29, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • The signup procedure is now embedded within the client. Signing up and testing our storage solution is now a far faster procedure than before
  • Better error reporting if jAlbum can't connect to jalbum.net storage accounts
  • Album objects having file names containing illegal, non web safe characters (like %, # and ?) are now highlighted with warning icons
  • Developers: Added Google Maps formatted ${gpsLocation} variable
  • Now prevents accidental deletion of remote albums that reside directly at the web root folder
  • Updated bundled Turtle skin to 4.2.2
  • Bug fixes:
  • Wouldn't launch on old Macs running Java 1.5 if the default skin required Java 1.6

New in JAlbum 11.2.4 (May 14, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Performance improvements to UI painting and album building with Turtle skin
  • Even more tolerant to faulty camera metadata structures (for instance images written by Adobe Lightroom)
  • Bundled updated Turtle, Mr.Burns and Lumen skins
  • Media RSS files will now have absolute links (per the media RSS specification) if the new "Address" field under album settings points out the destination album URL.
  • Minor code improvements
  • Developers: New CompiledBase API for compiled skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug where video resolution was reset when loading projects having custom video settings

New in JAlbum 11.2.1 (May 14, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Album projects can now be ordered by reverse name too
  • Renamed "Include original" to "Do not re-encode" for videos
  • Now more tolerant to faulty camera metadata structures. Images processed through Adobe Lightroom used to not have its EXIF metadata visible in jAlbum due to an incorrectly written "EXIF Directory length" field. jAlbum now handles such files too.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing only the first of several IPTC keywords to show (Since 11.2)

New in JAlbum 11.2 (Apr 20, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Added "Project ordering" drop menu. Projects can now be ordered by name or last used
  • Videos can now be selected to have their processing bypassed (check "Include original")
  • Added play button onto videos in the user interface to better indicate them
  • Extended tool-tip display time from 4 seconds to 10 seconds
  • Updated bundled skin Turtle to v4.1
  • Armenian translation added. Thank you Hrant Ohanyan!
  • Bug fixes:
  • The preview image was not updated while the video clip sliders were dragged
  • The video clip slider was not visible for videos having their own custom thumbnail file (.thm file)
  • Editing titles and ratings of objects in a sub folder wouldn't trigger reprocessing of that sub folder if "Process only updated sub folders" was selected
  • Fix to disabling of undo/redo for read-only text components
  • Respects portrait oriented embedded thumbnails instead of creating separate thumbnails
  • Style hints was applied twice and caused deadlock if opening a project while loading a skin
  • Fixed character encoding issue for EXIF and IPTC metadata
  • The videoWidth and videoHeight variables weren't calculated correctly if a custom thumbnail file were present having other dimensions than the video
  • The underlying metadata-extractor library was sometimes wrongly returning metadata for an embedded thumbnail instead of metadata for the main image
  • The demo filter "SimpleFilter" was broken

New in JAlbum 11.1.5 (Apr 16, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Renamed "Use as folder thumbnail" to "Make key photo" and moved closer to top of context menu (inspired by iPhoto)
  • Bundled updated Turtle skin v4.0.11
  • The detection of skin changes upon make album that triggers skin reloading is now based on version number instead of checking last modified date
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum 11.1 could fail with out of memory error when making huge albums (around 20.000 images). Now reverted to earlier memory management.
  • Import settings wasn't fully tight
  • Now prevents .mp4 videos from being overwritten if output is set to same directory as input directory
  • jAlbum wouldn't use the embedded thumbnail images of some portrait oriented images when painting the user interface thumbnails, and would instead generate its own (since v11)
  • Minor bug fixes

New in JAlbum 11.1 (Apr 10, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Asks user whether he wishes to copy added files or link to them (saves disk space for instance). See this blog post for more info on different ways of managing images with jAlbum.
  • Copy files progress bar now shows progress during the copying of large files too
  • Performance enhancements
  • Minor UI adjustments
  • Updated bundled skins Turtle and Base.
  • More robust against broken images
  • Verifies date pattern under advanced album settings so incorrect patterns are prevented
  • Now reporting number of videos when adding albums to jalbum.net
  • Now using a smaller folder icon when in small thumbnail view
  • Developers: New API for fast and flexible counting of object categories
  • Logo filter can now be excluded for selected images
  • Bug fixes:
  • Updating a skin from within jAlbum would reload default skin settings instead of keeping project settings
  • Party uploaded files weren't completed on next upload
  • Files having a "-" in the start of the file name weren't sorted according to user's wish
  • Updating skins would sometimes cause an exception to be thrown
  • Typing special Polish characters when entering captions would trigger events like undo/redo
  • Updating skins would sometimes cause an exception to be thrown
  • Moving deleting and excluding videos was not synchronized with the corresponding video file in the album structure
  • Wasn't possible to select folders to represent albums
  • Ensures that any locally stored manifest.jmf file isn't uploaded (should never be manually uploaded)
  • The selected style on Mac wasn't rendered correctly
  • Made uploading albums more robust against jalbum.net not responding correctly
  • Fix to bug in detection of circular folder references (equal folder names would fool the logic)
  • Fix to bug calculating the right web root url from an ftp server name

New in JAlbum 11.0.5 (Apr 10, 2013)

  • News and Updates:
  • Converts over 160 video formats suitable for the web (mp4). See blog post
  • Auto detects and adjusts video orientation
  • Allows videos to be rotated
  • Videos can have their start and end trimmed
  • Generates preview images for videos
  • Supported video formats are configurable under preferences. There is also a master switch to enable/disable video support under Preferences
  • Now smart enough to pick the latest skin version from disk, be it either a bundled skin or an installed skin (Previously just picked an installed skin, if present)
  • If skin related error occurs, a friendly error dialogue is now displayed helping users to update skin and report errors. (Switch on debug mode to get the classic error dialogue)
  • New license info panel under "About jAlbum" window
  • Bundled the Arty ("Instagram" like effects) and AutoCorrection image tools
  • Support for rotating all images, not just images coming straight from digital cameras (having EXIF data)
  • Tags published albums containing processed videos with a "video" tag
  • If unexpected internal errors occur (stuff printed to System.err), will display a small warning icon in the lower right corner. Clicking it will bring up the error message in the System console.
  • Remembers divider location, if "Remember window position and size" set
  • New pro looking program icons
  • New 128x128 web icon set
  • Minor user interface adjustments
  • Includes updates to Turtle, Base, Mr.Burns and Lumen skins
  • Clicking the thumbnail icon for the current album project will leave edit mode and return you to the thumbnail view (and root folder)
  • Developers: Now sets closeupPath for supported videos to slide page to enable embedded videos
  • Developers: New API for unzipping and downloading
  • Developers: Added the skin variables "videoWidth" and "videoHeight", that will give you the dimensions of the processed/final video (only present if video support is switched on)
  • Developers: Added file category support (fileCategory variable)
  • Developers: Blur filter now accepts different radius/strength
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing editing of moved objects to break
  • Fix for nullpointer exception bug when painting thumbnails
  • Fix for custom image size error (custom maxImageWidth etc ignored when generating variables)
  • Fix to error linking to non existent slide pages
  • Fixed bug causing style hints to sometimes not being applied
  • Fixed "Invalid code" error when activating license
  • Fixed folder ordering bug for folders ending in a space
  • Fixed bug where folder thumbnails did not always have the movie thumbnail painted right
  • Handles cases where Apache Sanselan can't include xmp metadata in generated hi-res images during upload
  • Fixed bug causing infinite loop when enlarging images
  • Various minor fixes

New in JAlbum 10.10.8 (Nov 28, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Windows version packaged with an updated installer software
  • Easier to correctly activate license (erroneous trailing spaces are trimmed from the activation code)
  • Bundled Base skin updated
  • Bug fixes:
  • Windows version could sometimes trigger security warnings
  • The "IPTC author" field of images could sometimes leak into the xmp title field of images
  • Uploads could sometimes end up with an error in "Notifier" (missing album URL)
  • Fix for custom image size error (image specific maxImageWidth etc variables ignored when generating variables)
  • Loading album projects by dropping project files onto the dock icon on Mac could sometimes cause errors
  • Fix for not being able to open folders containing double spaces in file names (Windows only)
  • More robust against errors reading xml metadata from .info files
  • Fix for calculation of album URL (we sometimes got "No web directory selected")
  • Running the Mac version as another user than the installed user would prevent the system standard file chooser from opening
  • Fix for nullpointer exception bug when painting thumbnails in the UI

New in JAlbum 10.10.7 (Oct 12, 2012)

  • News and updates:
  • Updated bundled Lumen skin now supporting image specific visitor comments via the commenting widget
  • Connecting to servers using the sftp protocol (secure ftp) now also supports the "Keyboard interactive" authentication mode.
  • Updated Dutch translation
  • Bug fixes:
  • The processing of PNG images was broken if "Force JPEG writing" was switched off.
  • jAlbum failed to paint the user interface correctly if running on Java 1.5. This mostly affected users running Mac OS X 10.4
  • jAlbum wouldn't allow deletion of a folder linked to a read-only target folder

New in JAlbum 10.10.6 (Oct 4, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Added new "jAlbum core update" external tool to simplify ad-hoc patches to jAlbum
  • Mac version now signed with a code certificate in order to avoid warnings when launching jAlbum on OS X Mountain Lion
  • Bug fixes:
  • Failing to append xmp metadata to file would make jAlbum ignore file. Now file is written without xmp metadata for such cases.
  • Uploading albums with updated images wouldn't include the updated images (broken since 10.10)
  • jAlbum didn't handle < and > in passwords properly
  • jAlbum would show a "Do you wish to save changes" warning when moving between album projects while a skin was loading
  • Several bug fixes to make jAlbum run properly on Java 1.7 for Mac
  • Keyboard support wasn't working when running the full screen slide show on Mac and Java 7
  • Album objects (thumbnails) weren't rearranged correctly in the project window when having "Hide excluded" set
  • IPTC metadata wasn't imported to xmp block if image already contained an xmp block
  • The version number didn't show in the about dialog when using the Alloy look and feel

New in JAlbum 10.10 (Sep 19, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Faster album making (roughly 30% faster image processing)
  • Faster loading of large album projects (album objects are initialized by multiple threads)
  • New "Make an album like that" feature: Ability to import album settings from existing published albums, so you can copy the look of an album you like. See File->Import
  • Ability to reset an album project to default settings. Practical if you've lost your way in settings. See File->Import
  • Easier and faster skin updating: Skins can now be downloaded and installed from within jAlbum. No need to involve the web browser.
  • Better, user configurable credit links, helping making jAlbum known. See Album settings->Pages
  • New Minimal skin (v2.0). Updated to today's web standards, but keeping the minimalistic feel.
  • Updated Base and Turtle skins
  • For skin developers: New alpha (transparency) aware color selector (JAlphaColorSelector)
  • Somewhat more performant file writes
  • Now verifies validity of web root URLs, making it less likely to have a 404 error when viewing final album
  • Widget support always on for unlicensed users
  • Various minor code improvements
  • Bug fixes:
  • Users could sometimes get a "No such user" error message after uploading albums
  • Album projects containing folders with representing thumbnails referenced via broken links wouldn't open
  • The output (album) directory was created as soon as skins were loaded instead of at album build time

New in JAlbum 10.9.2 (Aug 28, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated bundled skins "Mr.Burns" and "Lumen"
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed java.lang.NullPointerException when uploading albums (in Notifier.java:108)

New in JAlbum 10.9.1 (Aug 27, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum now always prints some diagnostic message to the system console if a severe error occurs that prevents jAlbum from starting
  • For skin developers: The JColorSelector component is now somewhat better at supporting colors with alpha channels on Java 7
  • Bug fixes:
  • Under rare circumstances, the recent project list would show each entry doubled (since 10.9)
  • jAlbum wouldn't launch on Java 7 (since v10.9)
  • jAlbum's embedded text editor would cause error messages to be printed to the system console when editing new files
  • The "Convert spaces to underscores" external tool was broken
  • Minor fix to embedded Turtle skin (stripping quotation from home page link text)

New in JAlbum 10.9 (Aug 24, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • New widget settings tab that allows you to manage widgets for albums from within the software itself
  • New address bar added to jAlbum's thumbnail view. The address bar continuously shows you the hard disk location of the currently open folder (can be toggled on/off)
  • An initial path can be added to the server name of connection profiles, thereby enabling users to upload albums to ftp servers that hide files and directories
  • Less annoying notifications: jAlbum now ensures that not more than two "promo type" notifications are shown per session. Also, such "promo type" notifications won't interrupt any currently showing notifications (they are put on a queue instead)
  • Updated ftp library to v2.3.0 (previously 2.1.0)
  • Promotion links are now never added to albums when a license is active
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixes to jAlbum's detection of published albums: Some albums didn't show up as published even though they were.
  • Some thumbnails in the recent album project list would sometimes not show. This bug has been around for years and now finally found and fixed!
  • The detection of recent album projects has been rewritten. There were occasions where the previous code could cause an empty recent project list. This will hopefully never happen again.
  • Fix for running jAlbum on Java 1.7 (fix for SocketReset error during ftp uploads)
  • jAlbum can now again produce that famous "ribbit" sound when clicking the frog face during start-up

New in JAlbum 10.8.1 (Aug 9, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • No longer saving passwords for account profiles as plain text (applies to new account profiles)
  • Added directory chooser button for "My Albums" location to jAlbum's preferences dialog
  • Updated bundled skins Turtle, Base and Galleria
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing mixup of some camera metadata when using multiple threads with some skins (really old bug)
  • The user interface was hanging if making albums after modifying a skin (installing an update or editing the currently used skin)
  • jAlbum didn't start on Java 1.5. This mainly affected those running jAlbum on Mac OS X 10.4
  • Fixed bug where jAlbum would choke on some unusually formatted xmp metadata in images
  • Reloading a skin now keeps the current skin and style settings
  • Filters out jAlbum specific files from the "res" folder of album projects when copying files
  • The "My Albums" location couldn't be set to the root of a file system (for instance C:\)
  • jAlbum would accidentally create a .jalbum folder inside the installation folder on startup (since 10.8)

New in JAlbum 10.8 (Jul 6, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Albums may now be tagged to increase visibility in search engines etc (see Album settings->General)
  • jAlbum now saves xmp formatted metadata with generated closeups and hi-res images. This for instance ensures that photographer copyright information and keywords are preserved (Setting is on by default. Can be controlled under Album settings->Advanced->Metadata).
  • jAlbum now provides a native way to add a link to your homepage from the albums (See Album settings->Pages). This was previously a setting each skin had to provide (in various ways). jAlbum also imports existing homepage links from skins like Turtle, Galleria, Photobox, MatrixSlide and Matrix. Skin developers: Please use the new homepageAddress and homepageLinkText variables to support homepage linking!
  • Updated bundled Turtle skin: Now supports facebook commenting among a list of other improvements
  • Updated several bundled skins to support new homepage linking
  • New and faster loading splash screen
  • Removed obsolete 3:rd party code
  • Various internal improvements
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing album objects to go out of order when converting links to copies

New in JAlbum 10.7.2 (May 16, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Again reverted to reading TIFF images using the Sanselan library as it is far faster. (Fixed issue where some images read via Sanselan didn't show up)
  • Removes camera maker copyright notes from the "IPTC Caption" field too
  • Increased font size on camera metadata listing and made font size adjustable (+/- keys)
  • Bundled with updated versions of Turtle, Mr.Burns and Lumen skins
  • Bug fixes:
  • Grayscale filter on Mac version didn't handle transparency
  • Fixed nullpointer exception bug in histogram

New in JAlbum 10.7 (May 3, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum now supports a histogram for easier image editing and analysis
  • Right-click image(s) and select "List metadata" to see all embedded metadata (exif+iptc+xmp) listed in a separate window
  • Right click image(s) and select "Open with..." to integrate jAlbum with your favorite image editing software.
  • jAlbum now also makes all xmp variables as parsed by Adobe's standard library available via the "meta" object under the "xmp." namespace. Previously, xmp variables were only available via a sparate "xmp" object.
  • Licensed albums are now tagged with an id number instead of the username of the license holder (for improved integrity)
  • Bundled with updated Turtle skin 3.2.0
  • Windows version bundled with updated Java 1.6.0_32
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum 10.6 wouldn't run from command line mode on servers lacking a display.
  • More robust uploading: Album uploads would halt with a "No such file" error if album sub folders had been manually deleted from the server.
  • For developers: jAlbum's layout manager RiverLayout wasn't respecting component's maximum size limitation for elastic components

New in JAlbum 10.6 (Apr 24, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • You can now be signed out and still have your license active
  • The Mac version of jAlbum now has a native file chooser for adding images and image folders. Thanks goes to TeamDev jniwrapper for the support for this.
  • Added alternative way of activating/attaching license based on a code (See Help->Activate license)
  • New sub context menu for picking page templates from currently loaded skin when building web sites
  • More robust reading of certain JPEG images.
  • Bundled with updated Turtle 3.1.2 skin version
  • Added "ImageListener" callback interface to "EditPanel" so plugins can easily implement histograms for instance
  • Added language info to published albums
  • Added a JAlbum.dumpThreads() debug method for developers
  • Added a "version too low" error message if users try to run jAlbum's internal text editor on Java 1.5.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Passing a -projectFile as argument to running jAlbum in console mode generated a nullpointer exception
  • Image size specific variables were sometimes lacking when processing "ja:fileiterator nodirs" elements
  • Broken images could cause a nullpointer exception
  • Uploading folders with missing project files would generate and error when writing the lifeboat.zip file
  • png files named PNG wouldn't be processed.
  • The "Server mode" tool wasn't working in UI mode
  • media.rss injection and Microsoft MarkOfTheWeb injection wasn't working for skins using headers and footers

New in JAlbum 10.5.2 (Mar 27, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated bundled Turtle skin to 3.0.5
  • Updated external tool "Import comments from rss file". Now repairs albums with sub folders too
  • Bug fixes:
  • Album builds could sometimes break with a nullpointer exception on multi core CPUs (since 10.4)
  • Bug fix to reading CMYK encoded JPEG images

New in JAlbum 10.5 (Mar 19, 2012)

  • News and updates:
  • Up to 8 times faster album downloading due to simultaneous file transfers
  • jAlbum now able to import published albums created with desktop jAlbum too (not just albums made with online jAlbum)
  • jAlbum now has an option to force GIF and PNG files to be written as JPEG too
  • Album projects can now be moved and copied without breaking
  • Automatically identifies and handles incompatible skins
  • Sign-out button moved to File menu (only to be used rarely)
  • Updated bundled skins Turtle, Base and Mr.Burns
  • "New skin" tool (Tools->Skin developer->New skin) now asks user what skin to use as base for new skin
  • Mac version repackaged without a visible "skins" folder. (Users should never modify the bundled skins)
  • Embedded skin editor now warns if user tries to modify a bundled skin (can result in changes being overwritten by updates)
  • "Lifeboat file" now includes custom pages too meaning that full web sites can be restored too
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed "ConcurrentModificationException" sometimes occuring when making albums (since 10.4)
  • Album projects having deep sub folders with the same name (for instance "Family/2011" and "Work/2011") could cause jAlbum to open the wrong sub folder while navigating

New in JAlbum 10.4.4 (Mar 9, 2012)

  • Bug fixes:
  • Applying a sharpening filter on certain JPEG images could cause an "Unable to convolve src image" error (Old Java bug #6585922 we've now worked around)

New in JAlbum 10.4.3 (Mar 8, 2012)

  • jAlbum would re-upload hi-res images every time, even if they were already uploaded (broken since 10.4)

New in JAlbum 10.4.2 (Mar 7, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated software certificate for windows installer package
  • Bug fixes:
  • Widgets broken on some skins that were including the page footer (Galleria and others)
  • Wouldn't allow users to make albums to the same folder as the image/input folder (broken since 10.4)
  • Images with broken metadata (EXIF) structures could cause out of memory conditions (old issue)
  • The ja:widget tag now allows the page type to be passed with the ${pageType} syntax

New in JAlbum 10.4 (Mar 2, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Support for making whole web sites and not just albums. Currently supported by "Turtle", "Galleria", "Minimal" and "Base" skins (now bundled). More skins to follow.
  • About 40% faster page processing due to better use of multi-core CPUs
  • Bundled updated Turtle 3.0 and Base 2.0 skins. See skin pages for a full list of enhancements.
  • Support for transparent images and PNG writing. GIF and PNG files are now written as PNG files
  • Images can now be individually scaled to different sizes (by overriding the max* image size variables for specific images.
  • Album projects missing a "directory" entry will now pick the image directory path from the project file location. This will soon help to making album projects truly portable
  • Alt-clicking preview will bring up final published album (only valid for albums uploaded using jAlbum 10.4 and up)
  • Removed "Generate Search engine friendly file names" feature for now. It wasn't ready for prime time (caused too many side effects)
  • Images can now be oriented in any direction
  • Added a "no IPTC" title source
  • Supports dragging and dropping .ico files too
  • Camera copyright messages are now filtered from the EXIF "Image desc." field
  • jAlbum now keeps track of dates and locations for made and uploaded albums (will be put to use in future versions)
  • Added "Activate license" button to about window
  • Introducing "licenceManager", "currentObject" and "currentFolder" and "rootFolder" variables to compiled code
  • Added a pageType variable (values are "index", "slide" or "page")
  • Puts a unique ID in the widget loader for anonymous / not signed in albums. This will make it considerably easier to later get rid of ads for such albums. (Will remove the need for rebuilding and reuploading albums after purchasing a license)
  • Made the objects "rootFolder", "currentFolder" and "selectedObjects" available via the system console as a convenience to developers
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum wasn't actually using the recently added "FTPES", "FTPS" and "FTP (ftp4j)" transfer protocols.
  • Xmp captions would be deleted from images that were linked into jAlbum when such images were deleted from jAlbum
  • jAlbum's notification system failed to work on OS X Lion (spitting out loads of error reports on the system console)
  • Fixed minor rounding error for scaling images (could get one pixel too small)
  • Images could show up incorrectly oriented if "Include photographic data in images" was checked
  • Rewrote progress dialog window. Now improved performance and fixed bug causing the progress dialog to spontaneously reopen after having been automatically closed after a successful album build
  • Unrelated files could be accidentally deleted from a server folder the second time an album was uploaded to a server folder where other files are already present
  • Moving images didn't also move the corresponding generated files
  • Some albums were made without thumbnails if a previously used skin switched off thumbnail generation
  • Replaced files (when adding files to jAlbum) are first removed, then added again. This removes stale cached thumbnails and stale generated slide images
  • jAlbum's settings window could become larger than the screen with certain skins and settings
  • AlbumObject.getLastModified() is now correct for folders too (senses structural changes to children)
  • The "onload.bsh" script file now has access to "rootFolder" and "rootImageDirectory" variables
  • Images taken upside down weren't oriented right

New in JAlbum 10.3.1 (Jan 5, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • Portuguese translation updated.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Windows version would hang when dragging and dropping images from the file chooser onto jAlbum. This bug has been around for over a year and is now finally fixed.
  • Mac version would fail with "Could not initialize class com.adobe.xmp.impl.XMPMetaParser" error on OS X Lion
  • Error reporting for skins that require "compatibility mode" to run wasn't tight

New in JAlbum 10.3 (Jan 3, 2012)

  • News and Updates:
  • More memory conservative so huge albums can be built without running out of memory. (Some older skins will need to run in "compatibility mode" to work with this release. See Preferences->Advanced)
  • Supports reading JPEG images in the CMYK color space too. Thanks goes to Werner Randelshofer for making this possible.
  • Sub-albums can now be selectively hidden (i.e. included in the album, but not linked to from index pages).
  • Can generate search engine friendly file names. (See setting under Advanced settings->Naming)
  • Guides users trying to upload to jAlbum's storage without having storage activated
  • Welcomes licensed users upon license activation. Excludes credit links by default for licensed users
  • New file type: .patch.jaskin: Contains only new and updated skin files. Deletion of the old skin doesn't happen. This simplifies distributing minor patches to skins.
  • Translations updated. Thank you all translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed memory leak on Mac that could cause huge memory usage when working with many album objects in the UI.
  • Fixed issue where jAlbum could hang if Make album was pressed while loading a project
  • Dismissing skin "like" notifications is now remembered
  • Negative camera metadata values expressed as rational numbers weren't interpreted correctly (for instance EV -1/3)
  • Fixed randomly occuring exception in renderer thread
  • Fixed exception triggered in "SpecialMacHandler" when quitting Mac version
  • Better error reporting if "Output has not been set" error occurs

New in JAlbum 10.2 (Dec 6, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Up to 10 times faster album uploads when uploading to external sites (uploads to jalbum.net are already accelerated). The accelerated speed is made possible by transferring multiple files simultaneously (see jAlbum preferences->publishing for configuring)
  • Support for the secure file transfer protocols "FTPS" and "FTPES" added. jAlbum now supports four transfer protocols: FTP, SFTP, FTPS and FTPES.
  • jAlbum now works correctly behind http proxies (proxy settings can be manually configured under Preferences->Advanced unless auto configuration works)
  • Added "Activate license" menu item to help menu
  • Updated 3:rd party library for script processing (BeanShell 2.1b4)
  • Updated 3:rd party SFTP library to improve stability on secure transfers (jsch 0.1.45)
  • Added new 3:rd party library for FTP transfers (ftp4j 1.6.1)
  • Updated bundled "Turtle" skin to v2.1.9
  • Updated bundled "Happenings" skin to v1.1.7
  • Updated bundled "PhotoBox" skin to v1.1.15
  • Bug fixes:
  • Upload window wasn't working using GTK+ Look&Feel on Linux
  • Images altered outside of jAlbum didn't trigger jAlbum to recopy them to the destination album (if "link to originals" and "copy originals" was chosen)
  • The remote directory (where to upload albums) was accidentally stored among the default settings

New in JAlbum 10.1.2 (Oct 18, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Bundled with updated Turtle skin 2.1.4
  • Faster start up time on systems with a large number of installed fonts (font list loaded in separate thread)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Could accidentally delete files from the destination folder on the server that haven't been previously uploaded by jAlbum. This is a several year old bug.
  • Autocompletes keywords with coRRect CaseIng and not just with small caseing
  • The embed album function could sometimes bail out with scripting errors

New in JAlbum 10.1 (Oct 8, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated filter bar: You can now filter on keywords too. Use comma and plus separated keywords to narrow the number of images to match your liking
  • Fast and convenient keyword tagging: jAlbum learns your keywords and autocompletes them as you type. See video!
  • jAlbum now offers you to "like" the currently used skin after a successful album upload.
  • Reset filter bar button added to filter bar
  • Filter bar can be closed with escape key
  • jAlbum's xmp property editor now imports metadata like Author, Keywords and Copyright from the older IPTC fields if an image lacks xmp fields but has IPTC fields
  • The filter bar now applies a logical "AND" between the ratings, flags and keywords categories, so it's now easier to for instance filter for all "5-star nature images"
  • Bundled Turtle skin updated to v2.1.2
  • New LicenseManager API replacing SignInManager for handling licenses
  • Minor user interface polishing
  • Added keyboard shortcut to import settings from other projects (CTRL+SHIFT+O)
  • jAlbum's PluginContext API now has a getCurrentFolder() call too.
  • Windows version bundled with latest official Java version (1.6.0_27)
  • Defaults to using Java's more modern "Desktop" API for launching browsers and opening file system folders in Explorer and Finder
  • Bug fixes:
  • jAlbum 10 introduced incompatibility with some skins (triggered scripting errors due to missing API call). Now fixed.
  • The external tool "Apply ordering to subfolders" was broken.
  • Some albums could get a broken parent link from the top level instead of no parent link (${parentIndexPage} was incorrectly null instead of missing)
  • When moving to a parent folder in a final album, you were incorrectly taken to the first index page instead of the index page linking to the current folder.
  • More robust against broken image data structures when figuring out image orientation

New in JAlbum 10.0.1 (Sep 26, 2011)

  • Bug fixes:
  • Wouldn't start on computers only having Java 1.5 installed (applied to early versions of v10)
  • Java 1.6.0_26 had a bug that prevented the file chooser from showing up when clicking "Add photos" on Windows, Windows version therefore again bundled with a bug fixed Java version (Java 7)
  • Several bug fixes to bundled Turtle skin
  • Some skins would incorrectly produce dead parent level links from the root album level (${parentIndexPage} was incorrectly declared for root level).
  • Some skins (Turtle, Lumen, Mr.Burns) wouldn't build albums from command line.

New in JAlbum 10.0 (Sep 21, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • New license model: jAlbum is now free for non commercial use only. For commercial use of the application you need to purchase a Pro license. The Pro license also lets you remove ads and white label your albums, and will give you access to our priority e-mail support.
  • Full xmp metadata support. Read and write metadata like caption, title, rating, keywords, author and copyright directly to your images and exchange data with other xmp aware applications like Adobe Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom
  • Now also supporting the image formats TIFF, PSD (some aspects), PNM, PGM, PBM, and PPM. For details see the Sanselan library
  • Albums can now be easily embedded in web sites and blogs by using the new "Embed album" feature. Skin developers can use the new "embed.htt" template file to customize how their skins are embedded.
  • You can now move album objects (images, folders) between album projects (within the same application)
  • The filter bar now lets you filter by flag/color (xmp Label) too, and the slide show allows you to quickly flag images by color using keys 6-9. (Use keys 0-5 to rate images)
  • Faster album making: We were able to avoid duplication of metadata reading
  • Upload button now defaults to the advanced upload window for externally hosted albums (ALT key toogles between quick and advanced view)
  • New XmpManager API for those skin and plugin developers who wish to manage the hundreds of other XMP properties there are.
  • Skins Lumen, Mr.Burns and Galleria updated
  • New "Copy file metadata to xmp" external tool that injects xmp metadata into the images of old album projects
  • Turtle skin now v2.0, a major rewrite packed with improvements and new expressions.
  • Translations updated. Thank you all translators for your continuous help!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to reading Unicode encoded EXIF User comments.
  • Fixed error causing "Convert link to copy" from two folder levels down to seemingly not work (the visual appearance wasn't updated)
  • Operations were applied to album objects that were selected but filtered-out by a filter
  • Some images got negative GPS coordinates

New in JAlbum 9.6 (Aug 25, 2011)

  • News and updates:
  • The thumbnail view can now be filtered on image rating (and in the future on keywords etc). Press CTRL+F to activate the filtering (CMD+F on Mac). See blog post for more details.
  • Images can be easily rated using keys 0-5 in both thumbnail view mode, edit mode and full screen slide show mode. The rating also shows in full screen slide show mode (can be toggled with the "R" key)
  • The full screen slide show can be played and paused using the space bar key
  • When adding files that already exists, allows the user to skip or replace on a per-file basis
  • New dialog explaining different drag and drop behaviors
  • If errors occur, the error dialog now has a "Copy" button to copy the error message to the clipboard (simplify error reporting to us)
  • Added skin API for commercial / licensed skins
  • Hovering the mouse over the "Filters applied" status icon of a thumbnail now lists the image filters applied
  • Embedded IPTC titles are now respected by the UI and ${title} variable
  • Flash videos are now also considered "media files" and gets a superimposed film icon
  • File type icons now changed from GIF to PNG type
  • New bundled Flash based skin: "Lumen"
  • New bundled Flash based skin: "Mr.Burns"
  • Skin "Simplicity" no longer bundled. Available from http://jalbum.net/skins/skin/Simplicity
  • Bug fixes:
  • Embedded EXIF captions on some images couldn't be properly read
  • Embedded GPS coordinates on some images couldn't be properly read
  • Switching between languages would reset the "After publishing" behavior to "Open publish successful page"

New in JAlbum 9.5 (Jun 20, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Avoids copying files already copied from camera memory cards by storing a small database on each card. (Behavior can be controlled under jAlbum Preferences)
  • jAlbum is now better at accepting files dropped from iPhoto and Photoshop Elements (got worse since v9). Such images can now be either copied or linked to jAlbum
  • jAlbum now detects camera memory cards inserted into the computer (Bundled CameraImporter extension).
  • Asks 1:st time users if they already have a jAlbum account when uploading
  • Clicking the account status bar in the lower right now takes you to your profile page signed in
  • Bug fixes"
  • Windows version now bundled with Java 1.6.0_25 as a bug introduced in 1.6.0_26 (the current release) has broken the "Add photos" button. Those who wish can download jAlbum without embedded Java here.
  • Files containing illegal web characters could accidentally be moved or deleted by jAlbum (since 9.3)
  • jAlbum failed to start on other systems than Windows, Mac and Linux (since 9.4)
  • Renaming a file extension between upper and lower case didn't work
  • The "Convert upper case to lower case" tool didn't work
  • Creating project names or renaming projects to invalid names now properly errors
  • Removed debug prints

New in JAlbum 9.4.1 (May 26, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Mac version now uses the Mac native file chooser whenever possible for a better Mac-ish feeling
  • The Linux installers (Ubuntu-Debian and RedHat-RPM) now associate jalbum project files, skins and extensions with jAlbum with proper icons. Thank you Cody for assistance on this!
  • French and Slovenian translations updated. Thank you translators!
  • Galleria and Happenings bundled skins updated
  • Embedded skin text editor now updated to include new v9.4 variables "currentObject", "currentFolder" and "rootFolder"
  • Bug fixes:
  • Album generation could halt with an "ArrayStoreException" if minor errors were encountered in the processed images (since 9.4)
  • The Linux Debian installer no longer complains about invalid binaries during installation
  • Skin developers: Calling getVars() on AlbumObjects now never returns null (registers those variables on demand)
  • Skin developers: Entering an empty string in a custom UI field and later clearing it won't leave that field overriding a skin settings UI field with the same name.

New in JAlbum 9.4 (May 13, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • New extension support. Extend jAlbum's functionality as easily as you install skins by double clicking .jaext files
  • Major updates to album engine. Now up to 40% faster page processing and updated API for skin developers
  • Config files now centrally located in one config folder
  • Logo filter now accepts different transparancy levels and rotation angels. New attributes are angle and strengthPercent
  • Excluded images can now also be used as folder thumbnails
  • Windows version now installs on both 32 and 64 bit Windows
  • jAlbum now has a better looking Windows 7 task bar icon.
  • External tools can now be installed next to installed skins (in a "tools" folder") and thereby survive jAlbum updates
  • Splash screen now has a debug feature to trace cause of startup-hangs. Alt-click the splash screen to trigger a full thread dump.
  • Updated Plugin API. jAlbum extensions can now install themselves in the Import menu too.
  • Missing album project no longer generate error lines to the console window
  • Bug fixes:
  • Skin installer sometimes quit before being done installing skins. This could result in all kinds of skin related errors. If you have any issues running a skin, try reinstalling that skin using this update.
  • Files couldn't be deleted from within jAlbum if they were located on an Apple AFS volume (Mac only)
  • Some ftp servers didn't allow jAlbum to list directory contents

New in JAlbum 9.3 (Apr 20, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Improved privacy control when uploading albums. You can now password protect albums as you upload them and select who are to know about your album updates on a per album basis
  • Import album projects from Online jAlbum by using the integrated import wizard (File->Import). Note, you cannot currently convert imported albums back to Online jAlbum albums.
  • jAlbum can now prevent you from entering file name characters that are illegal in web use. See Preferences->Album
  • Displays the project folder name instead of the image folder name in the album project list
  • Made the account you upload to follow the account you sign in as if the current account you upload to is a jAlbum account
  • Bundled Happenings skin now includes an Easter theme
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • The skin update notifier sometimes didn't compare version numbers right
  • The skin update notifier didn't handle skin names containing spaces
  • The "Make album" window sometimes didn't lay out the action buttons right
  • jAlbum couldn't list the directory contents on Pure-FTPd ftp servers
  • The skin update notifier would sometimes generate errors to the system console if the currently selected skin was missing on jalbum.net

New in JAlbum 9.2 (Mar 22, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • jAlbum will notify you when there is an update to a recently selected skin
  • The "Make album" window now also has a convenient "Open in file system" button that gives you access to the album folder.
  • Bundled with sponsored skins PhotoBox and Happenings
  • Translations updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • The TextFilter and ShadowTextFilter is now capable of rotating text around it's own axis. This allows for more flexible placement of watermarks for instance.
  • Bug fixes:
  • The "Server mode" external tool would end up in a loop rebuilding the current album.
  • Selecting "Rename" from the context menu of album objects would edit the caption instead of the file name.
  • On occation, some users would get an IllegalStateException when uploading albums
  • Moving or deleting a file with attached .thm file didn't also move or delete that file
  • When donating by pressing the "Donate" button within the application, one didn't automatically get signed into the web site
  • When moving between images in edit mode, you would see the end of long captions instead of the beginning.

New in JAlbum 9.1.3 (Feb 25, 2011)

  • Bug fixes:
  • Version 9.1.2 introduced a bug where the album was always generated on the C: drive on Windows no matter the output directory setting
  • Mac and Linux users couldn't previously use filesystem soft links referencing the image directory and output directory

New in JAlbum 9.1.2 (Feb 23, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Turkish translation updated
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixes bug that was introduced in v9 that caused some skins to break: JSP-style comments in included code snippets caused album build to fail
  • Fixes bug that was introduced in v9 that caused the removal of unnecessary newlines in the generated html code to not work for included code snippets

New in JAlbum 9.1 (Feb 11, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • New tool to convert links to copies (right click album objects to access it from the context menu)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug that caused the recent album project list to sometimes be cleared (has been around for years)
  • Keyboard navigation focus was lost when moving into subfolders and to the parent folder
  • On some occations, the donate reminder dialog could show even for users who had donated or paid for a Premium or Power account

New in JAlbum 9 (Jan 28, 2011)

  • News and Updates:
  • Defaults to copying added files instead of linking. You can now move or delete your original images without breaking the ability to update existing album projects.
  • New "hi-res" (2048x2048) image linking option. This enables your visitors to easily download printable versions of your images. (Skin developer can use the new variables "hiResPath", "hiResWidth" and "hiResHeight" that exists only if hi-res images are present)
  • Faster startup for users having many recent album projects listed
  • More robust startup
  • Writes a "lifeboat.zip" to published albums containing all project settings (including captions), thereby simplifying recovery of lost album projects
  • More robust publishing (failing to delete old remote files won't halt the upload process)
  • Generates better looking code (extraneous empty lines removed)
  • Doesn't display sign in window when starting for first time users. The sign in window is only displayed when the user opts to use any of Jalbum's services
  • Local sharing of albums to root of web site using jAlbum's embedded web server allowed
  • Scrolling the album project list using the mouse now steps in more natural increments
  • Displays a donation reminder dialog when quitting (can be dismissed for the current version)
  • Better drag and drop support with digiKam for Linux
  • Better validation of entered image- and thumbnail bounds
  • Updated bundled Turtle and Galleria skins
  • Updated translations. Thank you dear translators!
  • Various minor code improvements
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed a bug making Jalbum ask for quota changes during long network operations
  • Fixed drag and drop bug (selected wrong object after drop)
  • Fixed bug where one was unable to drop onto a selected folder
  • Renaming a project that outputs the album to the image directory didn't also adjust the output directory

New in JAlbum 8.13 (Nov 24, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • You can now download as well as upload albums using Jalbum
  • The album uploader has been rewritten. It now allows you to optionally include hi-res images after an album has been uploaded. This makes your album printable and provides a decent backup of your images. The new uploader is also better at resuming interrupted uploads
  • Updated bundled skins Turtle and Galleria
  • Bug fixes:
  • Deleting caption text in the thumbnail view from within a subfolder on Windows would incorrectly return you to the parent folder
  • The "Batch rename files" external tool was broken

New in JAlbum 8.12 (Oct 14, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • Updated French, Korean and Romanian translations
  • Users may now decide if to have film icons added on top of movie thumbnails or not (see album settings->Images->Advanced)
  • Updated underlaying component layout library (miglayout-3.7.3.1)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Some images would cause nullpointer exception errors in Jalbum's XMP parser (XMPReader)
  • Jalbum's embedded text editor could end up in a hidden, unreachable state if closed when containing unsaved documents
  • The "Pages" settings tab would get an incorrect label when changing language without restarting Jalbum

New in JAlbum 8.11 (Oct 11, 2010)

  • Displays the file name in grey below album objects that lack a description (when View->Label type is set to "Caption")
  • Includes a new Tool to simplify translating Jalbum and Jalbum skins to different languages (see Tools->Translator)
  • French, Korean and Hungarian languages updated. Thank you translators!
  • Bundled Turtle skin updated to v1.3.4

New in JAlbum 8.10 (Oct 7, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • Image captions can be edited in thumbnail view
  • Donors can now disable credit links back to jalbum.net
  • You can now use tab and shift-tab to navigate between objects of an album project
  • Removed the dreaded "Output to image directory" setting
  • Faster loading of large album projects
  • Bundled Turtle skin now loads far faster (compiled UI code) and updated with new features
  • Made the "Directory" and "Output directory" fields more visible so Jalbum's model isn't too hidden
  • One can now right click the "Directory" and "Output directory" fields and select "Open in file system"
  • Skin installer now defaults to checking "install" checkbox for already installed skins making updating skins more convenient
  • Defaults to showing your final web album in the browser after publishing to your own site (when not being signed in)
  • New "xmp" variable available for skin developers containing raw xmp properties
  • Skins may now disable the superimposing of a film icon on movies by setting the "superimposeFilmIcon" skin property to false
  • The embedded skin editor now remembers last window size and position
  • Added detection of "datetime original" and "datetime digitized" xmp properties
  • Various minor code adjustments
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix to relativePath when referring across devices
  • GPS coordinates written by recent Nikon software was being misinterpreted

New in JAlbum 8.9.3 (Aug 17, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • When repairing broken links in album projects, Jalbum now also automatically repairs broken links in subfolders
  • The embedded skin text editor now launches faster when opening multiple documents (CTRL+SHIFT+E)
  • Image specific and folder specific variables now have higher precedence than global user variables. This change makes user variables behave as expected and opens up for more flexible use for advanced users
  • Uses faster API for file copy operations (Java NIO)
  • Updated bundled Turtle skin to v1.3, now with improved Google maps integration, bug fixes and sharing abilities with social networks like Facebook and Twitter
  • Updated Finnish, Polish and Romanian translations. Thank you translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Repairing broken links in album projects when moving between PC and Mac was tedious. Should now work far better.
  • Fix to image size calculation. Could sometimes differ one pixel between physical size (correct) and size reported in generated pages

New in JAlbum 8.9.2 (Jul 10, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • The embedded text editor updated. Among the changes is a new tabbed UI, anti-aliased text and multi document search & replace
  • Installer updated to AdvancedInstaller 7.7. Several bug fixes
  • Context sensitive help added
  • Skins can now supply their own media.rss template file
  • User installed skins are indicated in bold in the skin list
  • Right clicking between thumbnails allows you to edit properties for the current folder. (Enables you to edit custom properties for the album itself)
  • On user request: Reverted to storing bundled skins under the installation folder again (but made them removable)
  • New external tool to reset Jalbum to factory default settings
  • Skin developers: You now have access to the embedded text editor via new "TextEditor" API.
  • Installed skins now get the last modified date set in the skin package
  • Updated bundled skins Turtle, Simplicity and Galleria. Thank you skin developers!
  • Updated Notification API
  • European portugues translation added
  • Updated translations. Thank you all translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Running Jalbum in command line broken for some skins since 8.9
  • Dismissed notifications sometimes popped up again. Could take a couple of dismissals until they finally went away.
  • The collapsible panels now respect the color of the selected look and feel
  • The detection of circular folder references in the album engine wasn't working, resulting in out of memory condition
  • Version number comparator couldn't handle going from x.9 to x.10.

New in JAlbum 8.9.1 (Jun 15, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • Notification API (introduced in Jalbum 8.9) enhanced and rewritten
  • Bug fixes:
  • Korean translation for Simplicity skin was broken

New in JAlbum 8.9 (Jun 11, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • Prepared for Jalbum's future photo book service
  • New notification panel for non-intrusive, information messages
  • Linux version should now run on Open Java as well as Sun's Java
  • Better detection of circular folder references. Throws descriptive error instead of wasting all available RAM during album build
  • Developers: New SkinModel and SlideModel classes for skins that wish to decide on the data type mapping of variables and set defaults
  • Developers: JCustomPanel now prevents calls to saveUI when loading the UI. This makes it safe to use plain event listeners or Jalbum's new StateMonitor to synchronize component state and then call saveUI from there.
  • Developers: LinkFile objects print themselves more clearly
  • Developers: Jalbum's internal HttpConnection class can now upload files
  • Developers: Jalbum's SignInManager can now throw PropertyChangeEvents when signing in/out
  • Developers: Jalbum's FileFilters utility class can now generate JPEGs to RAM memory
  • Eight languages updated. Thank you dear translators!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Opening the file chooser on Windows while running Jalbum on Java 1.5 would fail
  • Fixes bug in relativePath calculation. The bug caused incorrect paths between folders with similar names ("res" and "restaurant" for instance)
  • Jalbum sometimes scaled images one pixel too small. Having a 2000x2000 bound could make Jalbum scale to 1999xsomething (rounding error). This one has been around since Jalbum 1.0 probably
  • Fixed bug in Jalbum's edit panel. The image being edited was left even when moving to the explore view or switching album project. Now the currently edited image is cleared when editing is done (We do a setAlbumObject(null), therefore check any image specific UI plugins that they can handle null as argument to setAlbumObject!
  • JAlbum's PropertySettingFilterWrapper class now compatible with Jalbum's XML serialization
  • Fixed bug in Jalbum's AlbumImage class when using files that haven't had their variables initialized
  • Fixed bug in reading text resources over a network (we were assuming local file system access)
  • Jalbum's classic Blur and Sharpen filters wouldn't handle images having other color models than RGB

New in JAlbum 8.8 (May 3, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • Windows users now get the native Windows file chooser when adding images to Jalbum
  • Ability to sign in using either email or username (even for first time sign in)
  • More forgiving when reading corrupted images (will load using old API if new API fails)
  • Image bounds selector modified so it is more obvious that one can set any image bounds, not just the presets
  • New splash screen and sign in window (with the close button to the right this time)
  • Updated bundled skins Turtle, Chameleon, Galleria and Simplicity. Thanks all skin developers!
  • On Windows, bundled skins are now installed in the same location as installed skins (under AppData\Jalbum\skins)
  • New variable "contentPath". contentPath works like imagePath, but links to the content of movie files instead of to an icon
  • New variable "mimeType" available. mimeType reads from system/filetypes.xml. (Currently only a few file types have MIME type defined)
  • Image specific skin defined variables now have automatic data type mapping too (were previously all considered Strings)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Media RSS file wasn't linking properly to movie files

New in JAlbum 8.7.2 (Mar 17, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • Skin developers now have a handy skin property editor located under Tools->Skin developer. Thank you Tom for this addition!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Some skins were not installed correctly - were missing files. Since v8.5
  • Previewing albums or opening file system folders from within Jalbum was broken for some users (Suspected bug in new Java 1.6 java.awt.Desktop API). Since 8.7
  • Bundled skin Chameleon had a bug which corrupts the album generation with pictures holding no metadata

New in JAlbum 8.7.1 (Mar 17, 2010)

  • Bug fixes - Jalbum 8.7 introduced a bug breaking the closing of album projects some times.

New in JAlbum 8.7 (Mar 17, 2010)

  • News and Updates:
  • New spectacular skin as default: Turtle
  • Credit links can now easily be removed with a checkbox tick (Premium accounts only)
  • Warns if skins require an updated Jalbum
  • Figures out location of "My Pictures" dynamically using registry lookup on Windows
  • Better behavior on Linux: Repackaged specifically for Ubuntu. Skins are installed under user home. Better browser and file system integration.
  • Various API improvements for skin developers. See jalbum.net/api
  • Installer for Windows updated to "AdvancedInstaller 7.5.2"
  • Several languages updated. Thanks goes to all translators and specifically to Miguel Herrero Baena for updating the Spanish translation for Jalbum and all bundled skins!
  • Bug fixes:
  • Skin hints were sometimes not applied when starting Jalbum

New in JAlbum 8.5.3 (Nov 30, 2009)

  • News and Updates:
  • Publishing from the command line now capable of creating missing directories on the server
  • Jalbum's image crop tool/filter is now more convenient to work with. Hold down SHIFT at any time to snap a region to the selected image ratio.
  • New image scalers and image processors (loading, scaling, filtering, saving) can now be plugged in.
  • Translating Jalbum's image filters is now easier
  • Better reporting if an album doesn't fit before publishing
  • New icons
  • Jalbum now processes a common.css file during album making
  • Renaming a project will also reset the remote destination folder. This in order to avoid publishing a new album on top of another.
  • When signing in, new account profiles are set up unless there are only non-jalbum accounts set up.
  • The generation of thumbnails can be switched off in the album engine.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Publishing from the command line when passing a project file as parameter failed
  • Jalbum produced a "Do you want to save changes" dialog when the only change was "Make all" vs "Make changes"

New in JAlbum 8.5.1 (Oct 12, 2009)

  • Smoother user experience.
  • More power to skin developers.

New in JAlbum 8.5 (Sep 29, 2009)

  • Easier to switch between album projects.
  • Easier to delete albums.
  • More informative.

New in JAlbum 8.4.1 (Sep 15, 2009)

  • News and Updates:
  • Made skin settings button more obvious to find.
  • Updated Korean and Romanian languages. Thank you translators!
  • Added 9:16 ratio to crop image tool.
  • Updated installer version to AdvancedInstaller 7.2
  • Bug fixes:
  • When first time users created an album project, it was incorrectly stored under Jalbum's installation directory (the "My Albums" location was wrong).
  • Since image specific user variables and image specific skin variables were introduced, global skin variables with the same name unfortunately had precedence over these. Not so anymore.
  • Fixed unicode issues when reading IPTC camera metadata.
  • Made parsing of embedded GPS coordinates more robust.

New in JAlbum 8.4.0 (Sep 7, 2009)

  • News and Updates:
  • Introducing an album project list in the left section of Jalbum's window. You get better overview of your album projects and continuing where you left off is now only one mouse click away.
  • The list sports buttons for common album operations. More detailed control is available via a context menu.
  • Deleting published or local albums is now far easier via new album project context menu.
  • Added a shortcut button that brings up the settings panel for the currently selected skin.
  • Added parent folder button to toolbar to simplify navigating albums with subfolders.
  • Remembers window's last size and position.
  • New album information window that allows previewing both the local and published album + gives better understanding on where things are put and how large albums are.
  • Jalbum's command line mode now defaults to "smart make album", i.e. it figures out if image rescaling is needed or not. To override, explicitly specify -appendImages (true | false).
  • Jalbum account status is now graphically displayed as a bar in the statusbar of the window.
  • Double clicking the current album project brings up album settings.
  • Batch rename files tool has been updated to support variables.
  • Folders can now be deleted from the folder tree to the left.
  • Skins updated.
  • Translations updated for 10 languages. Thank you all translators!
  • Skin developers: Introduced two new variables: albumTitle and albumDescription that are global to the album (copies of the root folder's settings). Your skin no longer need to supply album titles and album descriptions.
  • Smarter JColorSelector, can be synchronized with a JTextField component.
  • The JSpinner UI control can be used in skins now (and have its values stored with the project file).
  • Skins can be reloaded with CTRL+R.
  • Extensible system for binding new UI component types to property files.
  • Jalbum's engine better suited for embedded/online mode use now (classloading improvements).
  • Skin developer menu now has a new "Prepare for online use" function. Use it with your skins and it's far easier to run skins in online use and in console mode without getting into scripting errors.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Displaying help in command line mode was broken.
  • Various bug fixes.

New in JAlbum 8.3.5 (Jun 15, 2009)

  • News and updates:
  • Added option to control if Jalbum attempts to use hardware accelerated image scaling or not. Hardware accelerated scaling is faster, but may produce lower quality on some graphics cards.
  • Jalbum's publish window now automatically reconnects if a connection is disconnected.
  • Added support for IPTC location and sub location camera metadata fields.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Password protected albums did not always get the padlock indication in the folder tree of Jalbum's publish window.
  • The blur image tool could cause nullpointer exceptions.
  • Password protected albums containing & or ' in the album name would never show as password protected in Jalbum's publish window.
  • Foreign characters in EXIF and IPTC string fields would sometimes be misinterpreted. (This mainly affected fields encoded in "ASCII" on Mac computers as these fields would be decoded in the local computer's default character set (MacRoman on Macs) instead of using the character set set in Jalbum.)

New in JAlbum 8.3.3 (Jun 3, 2009)

  • News and updates:
  • This version has album password management adjusted to fit Jalbum's new password protect mechanism.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Jalbum didn't promt to save changes made to skin settings.
  • Jalbum prompted to save changes even when no project was active.
  • Jalbum's edit view would display the wrong image if one had previously edited an image with the same name in another folder.

New in JAlbum 8.3.0 Beta 5 (May 19, 2009)

  • News and updates:
  • Smooth image scaling is now twice as fast and should be at least as good as before.
  • Instant preview. With this release I've also added a plugin that does a "quick and dirty" preview of albums. Try pressing F3 after making any change to an album (skin change, style change etc). Jalbum will now make a quick "Make changes" up to 25 images - max, followed by launching the browser for preview.
  • Tight publishing: Jalbum now compares what needs to be published in a fraction of the earlier time. This comparison doesn't suffer from any time difference issues like the previous scheme did. Also, files that have been deleted locally are now safely deleted on the server before publishing new and changed files. Finally this version is pretty good at estimating if the album to be published will fit or not. If it won't fit, the "ok" button is greyed out. Tight publishing works on any web host!
  • Introducing zipstream publishing! On servers that supports this (our hosting soon will), Jalbum now zips an album as it publishes it and the server unzips at the same time. Apart from the size reduction, this significantly cuts publishing time for albums containing many small files as all files are passed in one "zip stream" instead of being negotiated one by one between Jalbum and the server. The longer the "ping time" between Jalbum and the server, the more the benefit. We've seen between 2 and 10 times faster uploads!
  • Instant album deletes: On servers that support this (our hosting soon will), published albums can now be deleted in a fraction of a second, no matter their size.
  • Jalbum's File menu now has an "Import album settings" feature that makes it easy to make a new album using the settings from a previously created album project.
  • Jalbum's system console window and text editor JTextPad are no longer blocked from input during album generation.
  • Jalbum's "Skin developer" plugin - JTextPad now also packs skins to .jaskin files for easy sharing with the Jalbum community.
  • Image tool API cleaned up (the image tools are still in beta though).
  • Jalbum's classic text filter (and subclasses thereof, like Watermark filter) now supports angles so text can be rotated.
  • Jalbum's slide show now supports multiple screens - opens the slide show on the same screen as the Jalbum window currently resides on.
  • Better looking text area font on Windows Vista (from Courier to Arial).
  • Jalbum preferences now broken up into sections to improve overview.
  • Updated Boxer and Simplicity skins.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Skins should no longer have to supply a folder.gif file.
  • Keyboard navigation glitchy in Jalbum's edit mode.
  • Various bug fixes.

New in JAlbum 8.2.6 (Mar 16, 2009)

  • New Widgets:
  • Commenting
  • Visitor Counter
  • Name Tagger
  • About
  • Share

New in JAlbum 8.1.4 (Dec 18, 2008)

  • News and updates:
  • Improved keyboard support in edit mode.
  • When returning to explore mode from edit mode, the current image is focused.
  • The edit mode image filter buttons and settings button now have a "hover effect" for a less cluttered look.
  • Boxer skin updated.
  • Simplicity skin updated.
  • Romanian translation updated.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed "Proces only updated subdirectories" and compatibility with file and folder links.
  • Fixed paths in references to folder thumbnails (broken in 8.1).
  • Having multiple image links referencing the same image wasn't working properly.
  • The ja:fileiterator tag didn't always behave correctly when using relative references.
  • The ja:fileiterator tag attributes didn't properly support variables and scriptlets.
  • Other minor fixes.

New in JAlbum 8.1 Beta (Oct 31, 2008)

  • Widget support! Add new functionality to your albums like visitor comments, view counters, face recognition and more to come. Widgets work no matter where the album is hosted.
  • Jalbum is now smart enough to figure out whether to make all or just make changes. You simply press the "Make album" button (beta 6)
  • New quick publish button. Publish and update your albums in one button click! (beta 9)
  • Jalbum now allows you to sign in on startup. This simplifies several other usages (beta 9)
  • On successful sign in, a jalbum.net hosting account is automatically set up (unless you have other accounts already set up) (beta 9)
  • On successful publishing, Jalbum guides you how to do more with your published albums (share with friends, add widgets, manage on-line etc) (beta 9)
  • Album uploads now show progress in MB instead of files. The progress indication is also more accurate now.
  • The comment box in edit mode can now be expanded vertically
  • Updated "focal lengh 35mm eqvivalent" table to support more cameras. Thanks Armond!
  • Jalbum now executes script if found in system/onstart.bsh on every startup
  • Jalbum album RSS feed now includes camera information
  • User variables can now be set per folder and image too. See edit mode
  • User variables now ordered alphabetically
  • User variables can now be deleted easily
  • Accidental leading and trailing spaces in folder names are now trimmed
  • Advanced: Added system property "subsampling" to override the calculated subsampling. Using subsampling higher than 1 speeds up image loading and scaling and requires less RAM, but can cause scaling side effects with images containing regular patterns in high frequencies.
  • Developers: Jalbum's layout manager "RiverLayout" now properly handles invisible components
  • Updated translations to over 10 languages. Thank you translators!
  • Added a little "Easter egg". See if you can find it :-)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug causing void variables near every 1000 images if rows was set to 0
  • ja:fileiterator in combination with dirs and nodirs didn't work right when using relative references
  • Bug causing null pointer exception when repairing broken links fixed
  • Widget powered albums causing trouble with certain skins+browser combinations fixed

New in JAlbum 8.0.9 (Jun 14, 2008)

  • Link repair tool added. Double click broken links and point out the new location. Jalbum will automatically repair similar broken links
  • When files are excluded in Jalbum, the corresponding generated files are deleted too
  • Some languages updated. Thank you translators!
  • Jalbum now removes leading or trailing spaces from folder and project names
  • MetadataExtractor library handling EXIF, IPTC and XMP extraction moved to separate library file to facilitate further development by Jalbum community
  • Made Jalbum prefer built-in JPEG ImageIO reader to the one bundled with the TIFF ImageIO reader (works better for some images)
  • Border UI improvements for Windows
  • Jalbum would produce two album objects if a link to a file and a copy of the same file with the same name exists in a directory. The link should hide the true copy
  • Hidden excluded images still showed when navigating images in the edit view mode
  • Text resources for image tools now understand Unicode
  • Fixed null pointer exceptions in comment panel
  • Fixed bug relating to editing properties on a newly renamed folder (properties would be bound to old folder name)
  • Fixed null pointer exception in modified AlbumImage class (reverted to previous version)
  • Fixed number format exception in XMP parser
  • Real files that had been removed externally left "broken link" icons. Only links should be able to render as broken if target is missing
  • Added CDATA tag to Widget injection code.
  • The ja:fileiterator element's attributes didn't respect scriptlets
  • Reverted to not allowing dashes in variable names in order to avoid breaking skins that do arithethics like $foo-4

New in JAlbum 8.0.3 (May 22, 2008)

  • News and updates
  • User interface now completely supports drag and drop. Arrange files and folders between folders too
  • New image editor with pluggable image filters: crop, red eye, color adjustment (brightness, contrast, saturation), gamma correction, rotate/straighten, grayscale, sepia, sharpen, blur, flip, invert and pixelate. The editor never touches your original images!
  • Images having filters applied to them can be saved separately
  • Faster and more memory conservative image scaling, especially for very large JPEG images
  • Originals can now be included for selected images
  • File picker now displays thumbnails
  • Faster loading of images lacking embedded thumbnails
  • Control-drag folders to have copies generated inside Jalbum containing links to the files in the dragged folder
  • Improved image property editor with rating, titles (for images too), file date and comments
  • Images can now be rotated and included/excluded in detail view mode
  • Filters applied to images can be copied and pasted onto masses of images in a quick way
  • Easy access file system from objects inside Jalbum
  • Full cacheing of thumbnails for images lacking an embedded thumbnail
  • Synchronization between generated files and input files meaning that renames, moves and deletions to images in the input structure are reflected among the album files. No more dead files lurking around (A user preference)
  • Old problematic "clean files" function now restricted to the "res" and "gifs" folders
  • More powerful ja:fileiterator tag. Should minimize need for scripting for skin developers
  • New finally.bsh file for skin clean-up tasks
  • Media RSS support
  • Widget support
  • Preference to control if uploaded images open in browser or not
  • Reporting on number of objects, vs selected and excluded objects in Jalbum Explorer status bar
  • Modularized architecture (see new "lib" and "ext" folders for future plugins)
  • Bug fixes
  • Proper GPS coordinate reporting
  • Broken links are now displayed properly in UI
  • Various bug fixes