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Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

Comments with links to hidden folders

Chameleon’s “Enhanced Picture” is a wonderful feature that allows for a more pleasing album look. It allows one picture to be displayed in large size for each folder, and is well documented in the Help.

The recent addition of a comment with the Enhanced Picture enables more artistic freedom; this tutorial presents a few interesting uses related to “hidden folders“. See the tutorial Hidden or Private Folders. The Enhanced Picture comment can be used as an effective “Folder Link” to part of an album that is (but does not have to be) excluded or hidden.

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jAlbum Tutorials

Adding thumbnails to movies

JAlbum recognises ” .thm ” files, the small image file that is often created by digital cameras for a movie, and skins display the .thm image in the index page thumbnails and slide page thumblist. The thumbnail is used as an alternative to the skin’s generic movie icon. Clicking the icon plays the corresponding movie in the slide page.

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Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

Creating complex albums, combining existing albums into one master album

Maintaining large albums and combining existing ones into one can be a bit more complicated. If you have a large number of albums already added to the site you might not want to rebuild the whole album again each time you add new albums. In this case you can handle the sub-albums individually and finally make a master album of all. This technique has some drawbacks though:

  • When creating the master album JAlbum does not process the sub-albums, thus cannot compute the number of images inside them. You will see: Trip to London (0 images).
  • You will have duplicate ‘guestbook’ folders in each subalbum — need to be managed individually.
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Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

Using console mode with Chameleon

JAlbum can be controlled from the command line (known as Console Mode), and generally accepts the same parameters that you are able to set through the graphical user interface (GUI).

There is a lot of Console Mode information readily available on the JAlbum website (see http://jalbum.net/consolemode.jsp , which gives the list of allowed parameters and their defaults) and JAlbum Forum (for examples, see Automatically process sub-Projects and Making a multi-skin album in one pass). Note that the command line and GUI do not exactly mirror each other, and that there are some oddities to be aware of (ie the “Ignore Pattern” is one). User-defined variables are passed as -user.yourVariable “Value”, while skin-defined variables have a -skin prefix.