Release history

2003-11-24 4.0.4

• Updated Italian and Portuguese language files
• Updated BluPlusPlus skin to v1.11

• Would ignore existing album directories not containing original images when updating "master indexes".
• MetadataExtractor updated to v2.2.2. Will fix ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsExpeption occuring for some images. Thanks Drew!

2003-11-07 4.0.3

• Added Finnish language support. Thank you Markku!

• Would break on file names ending in non ASCII characters if URL encode links was turned on

2003-11-06 4.0.2 (language update only)

• Added new languages: Italian and Spanish. Thank you translators! JAlbum now talks all major European languages.

2003-11-04 4.0.2

• Added new languages: Dutch, Danish, French and Portuguese. Thank you translators!
• Added new 3:rd party skin: ExhibitPlus. Thank you Mark Fyvie!

• Didn't ignore the gifs directory when traversing directories after album images (since v4.0.1)

2003-10-31 4.0.1

• User may now specify a list of directory names to ignore during processing. Handy for those who make albums out of directory structures generated by digital cameras.
• Added new listFiles() method to the AlbumBean engine to simplify creation of advanced skins, etc. See API doc for more info

2003-10-31 4.0

• The JAlbum user interface is now multilingual. Current languages are: English, Swedish, German and Hungarian. More translations to follow if you helpful people out there can spare a couple of hours (check out the "texts" directory)
• Fully dynamic, rewritten, resizable user interface in order to support different languages. JAlbum occupies less desk space now, but can be enlarged if needed.
• Popular 3:rd party skins are now bundled: BluPlusPlus, XP, PBase and Experience. Thank you skin authors!
• Comes with a new multilingual installer.
• JAlbum now has a new tools menu where users can plug in their own extension scripts to do general tasks (like resetting file date to camera date, batch-rotating images etc)
• Added drop boxes for common image and thumbnail sizes.
• Reads and writes comments to external text files in order to speed up the process of adding comments (writing directly to the images is time consuming but still supported).
• Loading a skin with "skin hints" will clear old filter settings. (No more confusion on why getting black and white images...)
• Added option to control if directories are to be ordered before image files
• Replaced the annoying "load skin hints" warning with a checkbox.
• Added keyboard PageUp and PageDown shortcuts to easily move between images while adding comments.
• Improved scripting error reporting.
• Again uses BeanShell2.0 as scripting engine.
• Updated EXIF parsing engine (MetadataExtractor v2.2) meaning better camera data support.
• Defaults to not write UTF-8 as, for example Internet Explorer ignores the "charset" meta attribute when doing local browsing thereby missinterpreting foreign characters.
• Does not write the "UTF-8 signature bytes" anymore (browser compatibility issue). These bytes indicate UTF-8 files according to W3C, but is a too modern standard for many browsers (Mozilla for example) The effect was that three weird looking characters showed up in the beginning of a page.
• Automatically senses UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded text files (with or without the help of the W3C signature bytes).
• Will not attempt to write to write protected files. (Previously this caused hard-to-understand errors with the write protected hidden "Thumbs.db" file that Windows XP generates)
• The list of skins is always ordered alphabetically now. Only skin directories are listed (i.e. plain files are not listed)
• The list of user defined variables is always ordered alphabetically now.
• The list of styles is filtered to only show .css type files
• Added new "Dates" utility class for skin developers. Please see javadoc for more info.
• Scripts may now abort album generation by throwing a se.datadosen.jalbum.OperationAbortedException
• Better compliance with xhtml when outputting data.

• Scroll bars didn't appear on the "Slide show" thumbnail page , even if needed.
• Background image didn't show up on skins having background images like "Polaroid" and "Film" (error in skins)
• Bug fix for Mac OS X 10.2: Clicking view album and edit skin didn't work. Now works, but untested for OS X 10.0 and 10.1
• Bug fix for Mac OS X: UI controls would collide

2003-09-11 3.6.1

• v1.3 of BeanShell scripting caused trouble with JAlbum image filters (problem with getClass() command) I have reverted to v1.2 until this is fixed.

2003-09-09 3.6

• Fully supports foreign and multibyte character sets (Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean etc).
• BeanShell scripting is updated to v1.3 with a host of new features.
• Scripting errors should now be easier to interpret and less lengthy.
• JAlbum can now check for updates (see help menu).
• Multilingual skins can be made by using the new $text.key syntax.
• Image ordering has been extended to allow "simple" name ordering in addition to the trying-to-be-smart name ordering that orders the numerical part numerically.
• New variables to simplify scripting: rootImageDirectory, rootOutputDirectory, rootPath and textEncoding.
• The IO.copyDirectoryContent method now also copies subdirectories.
• The generated albumfiles.txt file (for custom image ordering) now uses DOS/Windows line ending (simplifies editing in Windows).
• The AlbumBean.ProcessTemplateFile method is no longer static (respects text encoding set in AlbumBean)
• Standard skins updated to specify text encoding as a meta tag

• Writing comments to some JPEG images didn't work. Thanks Dmitriy.
• Changes to user defined variables wouldn't register correctly unless ENTER was pressed.
• Image ordering wasn't correctly set when loading projects under Java 1.4 (v3.5)
• The IO.relativePath method didn't correctly handle some situations.
• The files listed in the edit panel was not limited to those in albumfiles.txt (if such exists)
• The IO.urlEncode method didn't encode #.
• Mac OS X version: Would use MacRoman text encoding instead of ISO-8859-1 which caused problem with characters in the 128-255 range like � � �

2003-07-31 3.5

• Allows custom image- and directory ordering.
• Will skip directies not containing valid images or media files (unless they contain directories that contain images or media files etc)
• If an output directory (or directories) does not exist, it will be created.
• Image filters can now be applied before scaling is performed with the new "prescale" filter attribute (this change was applied to init.bsh).
• Added a zoom filter that especially makes small thumbnails more interpretable.
• Added a "Fixed shape filter". Crops images if needed so they exactly fit the dimensions set for "thumbnail size" or "max image size" in the user interface. This makes all images and/or thumbnails the same shape (portrait, squary etc).
• Accepts the -Dswing.defaultlaf command line option to select a custom look and feel.
• Allows zero or several rowiterator - coliterator pairs for index pages.
• The <ja:if exists="variable"> construct have been improved to also make sure that string variables are non empty. To do a classic existence test (not checking for null or empty content) do a <ja:if test="<%variable != void%>">
• The IO.copyFile API method now also copies directories.

2003-06-03 3.4

• Skins can now be previewed. Click the preview button and JAlbum will show a sample image for the selected skin. You can leave the preview window open to always show a preview of the current skin.
• Skins now accept the new "res" (resources) directory which replaces the "gifs" directory. The "res" directory is not duplicated if an album contains subdirectories/subfolders. (With the "gifs" directory, this was the case). The stylesheet file isn't duplicated either if the "res" directory is used in a skin, it is also put inside the "res" directory. There are two new variables to support this new scheme: $resPath and $stylePath which always points to the res directory and the style file respectively nomatter how deep an album structure is.
• All standard skins rewritten to make use of the new, smarter "res" directory feature and variables.
• Empty thumbs and slides directories will be removed from albums containing just subfolders and no images.

2003-05-30 3.3.2

• v3.3 Didn't start from command line
• v3.3 wasn't especially memory conservative

2003-05-12 3.3

• Pluggable image filters added. JAlbum is now capable of automatically adding watermarks, logos and texts to images, grayscale them etc. A couple of ready-made filters are provided that can be combined in any possible way by JAlbum skins. You can also easily write your own image filters with some basic Java skills. Try the embedded "GrayFilm" skin for a demonstration, it is a copy of the Film skin, but makes all images grayscale and adds the filedate to each image.
• Added FTP port number to Publish tab.
• Will warn users that selecting new image/thumbnail sizes without rebuilding the album may lead to poor image quality
• If an image comment is recognized as actually being a copyright message from an image manipulation software, it is not displayed in the generated album.
• Added support for Russian date format (dd.MM.yy HH:mm)
• Practical variable "level" added to assist in skin creation
• Added list of Java system properties to About JAlbum dialogue.
• On album generation, will execute any BeanShell script found "init.bsh" files in the JAlbum program directory or skin directories.
• Although not a movie or image format, will also recognize mp3 files and add icons for them

• Installer updated with about 28 fixes for different target platforms.
• Saving projects in image directory or album didn't update the "current project" setting so a subsequent save (ctrl+S) operation didn't always save to the right project file.
• Used to create an empty meta object even if no metadata was found, so the check <ja:if exists="meta">... in skins would always evaluate to true. This resulted in $variables representing camera settings showing unexpanded for images without metadata even if correctly enclosed in such an if block.

2003-02-11 3.2

• Page generation speed improved up to 400%. This doesn't affect much for first time album generation as image scaling consumes most of the time, but updates to existing albums is significantly faster.
• Pages that hasn't changed when generating albums are left untouched on disc. This enables quick updates of web albums by utilizing FTP clients with directory synchronization ability.
• Will not automatically write empty comments to images (safety precaution)
• Changed the "Save project to album directory" menu to do just that instead of saving the project to the image directory. Added a new menu option to save the project to the image directory instead.
• Recognizes .ram, .rm and .asf file types as movie files too.
• Handles parsing of US EXIF date/time format too.
• Several skins modified to work better when viewed from Netscape 4.7

• Script code put between a ja:rowiterator and ja:coliterator element wasn't executed properly

2003-01-28 3.1

• Script errors are now being explained better. This should simplify a lot for those who develop scripts
• Adding a dot (.) or underscore (_) in front of either a file or directory will make JAlbum ignore it
• Image folders are always ordered alphabetically (a-z) and placed before images no matter the image ordering setting. (User request)
• If output directory is specified as a relative path, it is now relative to the image directory instead of the program directory. (User request). Set it to "album" and save as default, your albums will now always be generated in an "album" subdirectory of the image directory you specify
• New variable $totalAlbumImages that gives the total number of images (and media files) in the image directory and all subdirectories
• Edited comments are automatically saved to the image when navigating between images so one doesn't accidently lose an edit by forgetting to press "Write comment"
• The full path of the image being edited in the Edit page is now displayed
• JAlbum also recognizes .qt file format as a movie format

• The irritating behaviour of the directory chooser not always accepting a directory choice now supressed. (Java1.3 bug)
• Following an "Up" link from a subalbum that uses frames (like "Vertical" and "Horizontal" and then clicking on an image would make the closeup image pop up in a window of its own.
• Some file name combinations (containing certain numbers) would cause a nullpointer exception when ordering images by name
• Comments written by Exifer could show up like the string "ASCII"
• In the Edit tab, if an image file name had more than one dot, the image name would be cut before the first instead of the last dot
• In the Edit tab, didn't include subdirectories when pressing "Get images from Album"

2003-01-10 3.0.1

• Rearranged the scroll bar for the edit page in order to be more intuitive (the vertical scollbar wasn't noticed by many)
• Added a $currentDate variable

• Leaves original file intact if there is a problem writing comments.
• More robust lossless image rotation, but there still are problems rotating some images
• JAlbum could in some rare occations halt with a nullpointer exception during file scanning
• The $parentIndexPage variable always returned the first parent index page when called from a subdirectory index page, even if the subdirectory belonged to a later index page

• The lossless JPEG rotation can in some cases distort images. Always keep a backup of your original images! There is also an undo functionality if you notice that an image gets distorted, but keeping a backup is recommended.

2002-12-28 3.0

• JAlbum finally has embedded image comment/annotation editing and lossless image rotation. You no longer need external programs to perform these tasks. See the new "Edit" section of JAlbum.
• New more robust EXIF extraction. JAlbum now uses the MetadataExtractor, which is the sucessor of ExifExtractor by Drew Noakes. It now has support for camera make specific EXIF data (Canon/Nikon) and reads IPTC metadata too. All accessible through the "meta" object (see "Creating skins").
• The API give skin producers more flexibility like procesing extra template files.
• Minor internal improvemnts and performance enhancements.

• EXIF extraction is more robust against odd EXIF formats due to rewritten EXIF parser.
• The pen button for opening skin directories for editing should work better on Mac OS X now.

• The lossless JPEG rotation can in some cases distort images. Always keep a backup of your original images! There is also an undo functionality if you notice that an image gets distorted, but keeping a backup is recommended.

2002-11-27 2.8.5

• Web site and local help improved with new tutorial on creating skins and scripts examples that add voice annotations to your albums and reset the file date to the camera date
• Directories starting with a . (dot) are ignored (Linux user request)

• Camera date/time between 12:00 and 12:59 (24 hr format) was interpreted as midnight time.

2002-11-21 2.8.4

• All skin files converted to PC line ending format (making them viewable in Notepad for easy editing by the ordinary Windows user)
• Non Windows and Mac users can now specify a -Dfolder.cmd=<program to open folders> argument at the command line when starting JAlbum in order to open the directory for the current skin for editing.

• Didn't handle image files with filenames containing long numbers (>9 digits)
• Changed URL encoding of two-byte characters to write the high order byte before the low order byte, i.e 0xAABB is encoded as %AA%BB instead of %BB%AA

2002-11-19 2.8.3

• Improved "Slide show" skin with selectable window or fullscreen mode

• Didn't resume to next next image on recoverable errors, but instead stopped displaying a debug stack trace. JAlbum will now only stop processing and display debug info if the new "Debug mode" checkbox is checked (advanced tab)
• Failed processing some Canon images. This is due to bugs in the new ExifExtractor code. I have fixed one of the bugs and expect further fixes from the author. JAlbum now defaults to continue processing the next image on errors in ExifExtraction instead of stopping
• Would hang on Mac OS X if one dropped a folder containing a JAlbum project. The modal dialogue that opened couldn't be answered
• EXIF rational values were sometimes not displayed in a normalized format (1/x format)
• The "View album" button stopped working on some Win98 machines (introduced in 2.8). This bug was a side effect of attempts to make the "View album" work on OS/2 and on Linux+Mozilla. Behaviour is now restored to 2.7 state and I will investigate this further for these systems.

2002-11-14 2.8

• Updated EXIF parser. Now uses the much improved ExifExtractor v1.2 from Drew Noakes (www.drewnoakes.com). JAlbum now offers direct access to all EXIF tags readable by ExifExtractor through the new "meta" object, even unknown tags. See scripting. ExifExtractor now extracts GPS tags and makernotes for 6 families of camera
• Recognizes and formats more camera date formats
• Added "BeanShell commands" to further simplify scripting in JAlbum. More on commands at www.beanshell.org
• New "Slide show" skin featuring full screen pausable slideshow with page transition effect.
• Improved reading of comments by enlarging font for most skins
• Minor skin adjustments
• Added a readMapFile() convenience method to the IO object to simplify scripting

• Didn't URL encode two-byte Unicode characters correctly (%??%?? format). Hopefully this fix will help Chinese users and others who have two-byte character sets.
• Pressing "View album" on some systems didn't always work as JAlbum not always passed absolute "file:" URLs to the browser.

2002-11-06 2.7

• More intelligent image ordering when sorting images by name: Images containing numbers will have the numeric part compared numerically and not alphanumerically. This allows files like "2.Hiking.jpg" to be sorted before "11.Hiking.jpg"
• Image sort ordering may be reversed
• Linux users can specify other browsers to be launched than Netscape by running JAlbum like this:
  java -Dbrowser.cmd="mozilla" -Dbrowser.arg0="@url" -jar JAlbum.jar

• Didn't select the correct style when loading a project (Introduced in 2.4.1)

2002-10-31 2.6.2

• The "Make album" button now also rebuilds modified images by comparing file dates. (Previously it only rebuilt images that didn't already exist in the album)
• Included a new skin - Old album

• Always rebuilt images of png and gif type even if "Make album" was pressed and scaled images already existed

2002-10-27 2.6.1

• Didn't handle empty directories or directories without any processable image/movie files (introduced in 2.6)

2002-10-26 2.6

• Supports html frames. You can now produce albums with frames so that users can view thumbnails next to the closeup image. Frames is a skin feature. Just place a frameset.htt file into a skin and it will be used
• Two new skins to demonstrate the frames feature created: Horizontal and Vertical. See the samples section.
• The handy shortcut objects current, previous and next are now also available on index pages
• Will inform users if they misstakenly drop files instead of folders onto JAlbum

2002-10-24 2.5

• FTP upload support Added with "smart upload" that attempts to only upload changed files. Although this is not the central task of JAlbum, I've added it for convenience

• Printing all variables with a <%= current %> expression within a skin caused an infinite recursive loop
• Didn't match a skin with it's available styles upon loading of a project (introduced in 2.4.1)

2002-10-23 2.4.1

• Skins can now contain layout hints if they are intended to be used with a certain image size etc. Layout hints is simply a subset of a JAlbum project file named hints.jap which resides in a skin directory

• All EXIF variables were stored as String objects even if another object type would have been more suitable (e.g. Boolean for camera flash setting or Float for aperture value)

2002-10-22 2.4

• Simplified scripting of skins with JSP/ASP like <% scriptlet syntax %>, and implicit objects (out, album, application etc)
• Even more web-friendly: Does a better job avoiding creation of absolute links (file://C:...) even if original images point to other locations in the file system than the output directory
• Tries to skip erronous image files and resume operation instead of halting. Will display an error log in case of errors
• New ja:include element to allow simple page inclusion
• New ja:ignore element to pass scriptlets to JSP/ASP engines for processing
• Improved ja:if element allowing arbitrary expressions to be tested
• Style sheet files are now parsed in the same manner as template files
• Added new variables "isoEquivalent", "currentRows", and "indexImageCount"
• Two new skins, "Colorful" and "Bluepro" added

• JAlbum now adds image comments from external text files carrying the same base name as the image files themselves (unless an embedded comment is already found)
• Users can now pick desired background and text colors of an album by simply selecting the AskUser.css skin
• Put a header.inc or footer.inc file in the image directory and it's contents will be included on the index page(s)

• Would stop with an "ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException" for images containing an empty EXIF block
• Minor fixes to skins

• Line numbers are not always reported correctly for scripting errors

2002-09-18 2.3

• Allows setting of user defined variables that override the variables set by JAlbum
• Handles a lot larger images now by allocating up to 256MB RAM if needed. (Previously used the Java default of 64MB which could trigger out of memory errors with very large images.)

• Would fail on images where comments were added by Exifer on images that didn't contain EXIF data
• The error dialogue was hard to close (the OK button didn't work, only the window close button)

2002-09-05 2.2

• Several new cool skins added that demonstrate the power of the scripting language (check out the samples)
• Console mode. JAlbum can now be controlled from the command shell. You may make shell scripts that update directories on a regularly basis etc.
• The eval element has access to three practical objects: current, previous and next. They contain all variables bound to these images, allows for very cool skins.
• rows and cols variables added to the templates
• Small, non disturbing "splash screen" added at startup so you know what you are waiting for

• Wouldn't extract EXIF data on some EXIF 2.1 images

2002-08-31 2.1

• Loading and saving of project files with recent project list
• Default settings can be saved
• Advanced expression evaluation and scripting added through BeanShell
• More EXIF data like image dpi and compression level added
• Automatically senses when new skins are added
• Button added that opens the current skin directory for easy editing (Windows only)

• The month of the originalDate wasn't displayed correctly
• Would go into an infinite loop if output directory was a subdirectory of the image directory

2002-08-23 2.0.3

• Will warn before creating albums with absolute image links (They don't work from a web server)

• Didn't format the EXIF originalDate according to the selected date format
• Sometimes displayed exposure times like 1/400s in the less intuitive 10/4000s form
• Didn't warn correctly if an image directory didn't point to a valid image directory
• Some fixes to the skins
• New version of the installer with several bug fixes

2002-08-15 2.0

• Style and layout can now be fully customized by the use of user extensible "skins" (Directories with images and template and style files).
• Extracts image meta information (shutter speed, aperture etc) also called EXIF data if present
• Output can be written to another directory than the image directory
• Image linking can now be controlled in detail (small albums not including originals, large albums with links to originals etc)
• Presets added for quick setting for different types of albums
• Supports odd JPEG color encodings now. Also supports PNG and GIF as well as most movie formats
• Multiple index pages
• Page filename extensions can be configured
• Progress indication during album creation is improved
• More intuitive UI design

• Lists directories before image files on index pages
• Date and time is formatted according to the current locale per default instead of yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm

• Order by date didn't work properly if dates varied extremely much
• Linking to a slide containing a movie file from an ordinary image slide didn't work.
• Some minor UI glitches fixed

2002-04-04 1.1.1

• This web content is also available as a local help file
• Help and uninstall is directly accessible from the JAlbum program group (windows)
• No longer expands thumbnail index tables to 100% of the page with

• Launching of the current web browser when viewing result didn't work on Mac OS and Linux

2002-03-22 1.1

• Installer/uninstaller added for all major operating systems. Thank you ZeroG for providing such a great free tool!
• Images can now be ordered either chronologically or alphabetically
• Handy preview button added
• Warns before writing album into a new directory
• The name of the thumbnail page can be set
• URL encoding of filenames can be turned off
• The GUI has been redesigned to handle more features
• Better looking icon :) Credits to Micce

• Images are no longer enlarged if they are smaller than the bounding box
• The directory chooser now starts in the current image directory

2002-02-20 1.0