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jAlbum Turtle skin

Sell your products with the help of Turtle skin

You might’ve missed it, but Turtle skin can be used to sell your photos or products too. To use this option you need to hold a Pro license or a Power storage account with jAlbum. Although the payment is routed through Paypal or Google Checkout, your customers don’t need to be signed up with these payment processors, they can simply use their credit card as well. Here’s how you can create an album with a shopping cart, and how the visitors see the process.

Creating the album

First collect the photos (of the products) you want to sell, and create a new album in the jAlbum application.

  • Add the photos by the Add button or by dragging them onto jAlbum
  • Choose Turtle skin
  • Add an image to be used as “Theme image” on the index page. Right-click → Use as folder thumbnail, and Right-click → Exclude
  • Switch to Edit mode (Pencil icon) and add captions to your items with the details of the product (you can use HTML code too in the captions)
Categories
jAlbum Tutorials

Adding and updating translations in jAlbum

Making localized version of a skin is pretty easy in jAlbum. First make sure you are using the language: Tools -> Preferences -> Language and if using the latest skin version (http://jalbum.net/skins/).

jAlbum has its own translation tool since version 8.11. Just fire up Tools -> Translator -> Translate selected skin if no translation exists yet, or Update translation otherwise.

Categories
Add music to site tool jAlbum

Add music to site

This little tool for jAlbum will help you adding music to any of your albums made with jAlbum. Download the attached zip file and extract to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\jAlbum\Tools directory on PC, Applications /jAlbum/[Right-click: Show package contents]/Java/Tools folder on Mac.

The tool is using Jeroen Wijering‘s excellent MP3 flash player. See the original site here. Please read the legal and licencing issues before using it.

Before you add music you might want to compress it to make fit for web use. A reasonable compomise between bandwidth and quality is around 92kbs/Joint Stereo. You can use iTunes or some other free encoder (from here).

Categories
jAlbum Turtle skin

Turtle – frequently asked by you

While giving support for Turtle skin some of the questions pop up from time to time. I gathered here some of the most frequently asked ones.

Where can I change this or that?


I’m aware finding the Settings window isn’t obvious sometimes. You can go to settings either by clicking the “gears icon” below the project on the left hand side or clicking the “skin icon” next to the selected skin or choose the “Album » Settings” menu. The skin’s proprietary settings are gathered on the skin tab (called “Turtle” for example).

Categories
Base skin jAlbum

Base skin released

One of the most appreciated aspects of jAlbum is the ability to customize albums to fit your requirements. It is therefore important that we have a thriving skin developer community. These days it’s more common to see updates to a smaller set of album skins than to actually see new skins emerge. We believe this is much due to the higher expectations users have when it comes to standards compliance, features and visual appearance. It can also be a daunting task to modify existing skins as they have grown in code size and features – you easily break things. Some skins may also have a licensing model that doesn’t allow modification.

The Minimal skin was initially made to be minimal enough to encourage people to base their skins on it, but it is old, both with regards to html+css style and visual look. We have therefore designed a skin that should be the perfect blend: Basic enough to encourage you to base your modifications and new skins on it, but with a current code style, feature set and look. Welcome “Base” skin!

Base skin has a simple, well-documented HTML 4.0 / CSS 2.1 (3) structure, still sporting tons of advanced features. The features were transplanted from my other skins (e.g. Turtle) – metadata formatting by templates, breadcrumb path, custom background image, site colors, fonts and watermarking to name a few. These will spare you a lot of time, thus you can focus on the important things: the HTML stucture and styling.

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Chameleon skin jAlbum

Chameleon skin styles

A total of 33 styles plus 49 sub-styles. Click on the thumbs to see a working example!

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Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

A favorites album, and using slide comments to point to other albums

A large JAlbum with hundreds or thousands of image can overwhelm a visitor. Often, only parts of it are of interest to a specific set of viewers, ie Family or Friends sub-albums. One’s artistic images may well be missed by the casual browser!

In a prominent place (say, at the top, so it’s seen first), place a “Favourites“, “Best Of” or “My Selection” album …. a group of say 40-50 images that give a flavour of the site, something to whet the appetite and entice a visitor to explore further. To facilitate this, a slide comment link can be used to take the user directly to the folder where the image in question resides.

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Chameleon skin jAlbum Tutorials

Adding custom header and footer to Chameleon galleries

Chameleon will include a header and footer if they are in the GUI (Settings > Header/Footer) or as plain text files named header.inc and footer.inc, respectively, located in an Image Source Folder or the Skin Folder (JAlbum/skins/Chameleon). The header is placed below the control bar and the footer at the bottom of the page. They give further control over formatting, are independent of the rest of the page contents, and can be used in addition to the Custom Link entries on the Chameleon > Album information tab.

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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.

Categories
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.