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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.
Categories
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.

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Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

Creating multi-language albums in Chameleon

Creating multi-lingual albums is pretty straightforward with Chameleon. Make sure you have Chameleon v4.10 at least (Settings / Chameleon / About).

1. Setup the album the usual way

2. Add comments

Add the comments (or descriptions of folders) and titles this way:

Default text - [en]English text[de]Deutsch text[it]Italian text

will result:

Default text - English text // on english page
Default text - Deutsch text // on deutsch page
Default text - Italian text // on italian page

or without using default:

[en]English text[de]Deutsch text[it]Italian text 

will result:

English text // on english page
Deutsch text // on deutsch page
Italian text // on italian page
Categories
Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

Hidden or private folders

A private folder should not be visible when you navigate from the top down into the different folders but only if you share/sent somebody the direct link to that “private folder”. The process is as follows:

  • Create the album (use Make Changes or Make All, as appropriate)
  • Exclude the folder(s)
  • Re-make the album
Categories
jAlbum Tutorials

Using “Ignore Pattern”

The Ignore Pattern on the Settings/Advanced tab is a useful and often overlooked JAlbum feature. For example, where one simply wants to exclude a folder (or a number of similarly named folders), just enter the relevant name into the JAlbum>Advanced/Ignore Pattern. It is case insensitive and accepts spaces.

It may seem to do the same job as the main GUI right-click/Exclude function to exclude album files and/or folders, but its true value comes when there is any recognizable pattern that holds for all possible file/folder names to be excluded. This obviously hints that suitable naming of folders, for instance, can significantly help in future album building. Also, the Ignore Pattern can be programmed via the Console Mode (see Using Console Mode With Chameleon & Hidden or Private Folders , for example).

Categories
Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

Building panoramic galleries with Chameleon skin

Panoramics are often up to 10:1 aspect ratio, and given that most people view these on landscape orientated computer monitors, the first restriction is image height. Generally, a user doesn’t mind scrolling in one direction, so panoramics that are as high as the monitor but extremely wide can be viewed relatively easily. This therefore dictates a 1-column layout for both the Thumbnail and Images, and a careful choice of image bounds .