Jalbum - a Fantastic Multi-Platform Web Album Creator

Seems as if these days, everybody has a digital camera. Except me, that is, but that's not the point. With all these digital photos floating around, it's easy to take a bunch of shots, load them into your photo collection manager (like iPhoto, Picasa, F-Spot or Digikam), and then forget about them.

Before the advent of digital photos, putting the physical prints into photo albums, then sharing those albums with friends and family, was the norm. These days, the way to share your images is by creating a web album, so all you need to do is point your friends and relatives to the web address, and they can visit whenever they want.

In this article, I'm going to talk about a cross-platform program, available for Mac, Windows and Linux, called Jalbum, that makes it simple to create fantastic-looking web albums with very little effort. Jalbum is simple, easy to use, and comes with a handful of nice album templates, with a community-driven catalog of even more templates.

First, using Jalbum is a breeze. Simply start up Jalbum (motto: Set Your Pictures Free!), and click the Add button. From here, you can select individual pictures to include in your web album, or else you can simply choose an entire folder of images. Depending on how many images you select, this next step may take a little bit, but eventually you'll see thumbnail images of all the photos you want to use, laid out in a nice grid.

Now it's time to pick what your web album will look like. To make this interesting, Jalbum uses what it calls skins. Each skin is a user-contributed theme for your web album. Some skins use funky colors, others use quite a bit of html/java script mumbo-jumbo to add cool and exciting ways to navigate through your photo album, while others are simple but effective.