The View from Landmark

Trends and issues in personal computing from Bud Stolker, a long-time PC consultant. The View from Landmark features tips and techniques to make time spent with your computer more productive and rewarding, commentary on new personal computer policies and trends, plain-English explanations of new hardware, software, and network designs and their relevance to you, and answers to common questions. There may be personal material interspersed if Bud believes it is of general interest.

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Publishing digital photos easily

I've found an outstanding tool for creating Web photo albums. It's a freeware program named JAlbum by a generous fellow named David Ekholm. JAlbum reads all the photos in a folder, compresses and reformats each one to a size of your choice, creates matching thumbnails*, then generates a sequence of Web pages using the thumbnails as an index to the larger pictures. Click on any thumbnail and a slide show revs up automatically. You can select from a variety of skins**, configuring the look and feel of each Web page to an astonishing degree.

Here's a sample album I created for a family reunion. The original photos were about 1.4 Megabytes each. JAlbum compressed them to less than 50K each for fast loading. JAlbum is a Java-based program, so it runs on Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX, OS/2, eComStation -- any platform that supports Java 1.3. I could go on about this program, but just read the feature list for yourself, download this gem, and get started on those online photo albums!

PS -- No spyware comes bundled with JAlbum; it's an utter gift. My hat is off to Mr. Eckholm. Such a deal!

* A small image representing a much larger one.
** An alternative graphical interface. A skin customizes the look of the program without affecting its functionality.