Use jAlbum 10.4 to create photo websites

Swedish web album creation tool, jAlbum 10.4, is now available, boasting a number of major new features. Version 10.4 now supports building entire websites rather than simple photo albums, promises up to 40 percent faster page processing on multi-core CPUs and adds support for transparent PNG images and the ability to scale individual images to different sizes.

jAlbum, which is free for personal use and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, makes it possible to create online photo albums quickly and easily via drag, drop and edit. Pick a template and publish -- either to jAlbum’s own online hosting service or your own website.

Version 10.4’s headline new feature is support for generating an entire website as opposed to a standalone photo album. This functionality is currently supported in just four of the built-in templates -- Turtle, Gallerina, Minimal and Base -- and is configured via the skin’s own settings button. Both Turtle and Base skins have also been updated to take advantage of this new feature, adding support for custom pages as well as top and bottom navigation bars.

Other new features include support for transparent images and PNG writing, meaning that both imported GIF and PNG files are written as PNG files. Images can now be individually resized by overriding the max image size variable, while you’ll be able to view uploaded, published albums via the preview button by [Alt]-clicking it.

Some enhancements have been made with an eye to future versions -- for example, album projects missing a ‘directory’ entry will now pick the image directory path from the project file location in anticipation of allowing users to create truly portable photo albums. jAlbum also keeps track of dates and locations of albums for future use too.

One feature that’s been removed due to the amount of side-effects it caused is the “Generate search engine friendly file names”. It’s envisaged this will be reintroduced in a future release when its bugs have been ironed out.

Performance has also been improved on multi-core CPUs, with jAlbum claiming it can deliver up to 40 per cent faster page processing speeds on these machines.

A number of other minor features and tweaks have also been added, including the ability to drag and drop ICO files into the album, plus support for orienting images in any direction. The update is rounded off by a number of bug fixes, described in detail in the program’s release notes.

jAlbum 10.4 is a free-for-personal-use download for Windows, Mac and Linux. Albums generated in the free version are ad-supported -- these are removed on purchasing a Standard (€19) or Pro (€39) license depending on the intended use of the program.