jAlbum 9

JAlbum is a free, Java based tool, which allows you to generate photo albums with sliding pages for the web. This software was created by David Ekholm, and it aims to be one of the easiest to use and most powerful tool in this category.

There are already a lot of people using this album creator, for it is a versatile program which has a lot of features. For instance, you can drag and drop a folder containing your photos into JAlbum and it will display the photos in the editing window, allowing you to quick select an album skin and style, thumbnail and picture size, and preview it before saving it. That's just for starters, because there are many options available: presets, support for JPEG, JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, WMPG format images. You can calculate the album size, extract comments from pictures, and much more. All skins have one or several CSS styles attached, so that you may choose one that is better suited for your album. What I like most about JAlbum is that is has many skins and styles that you can choose from, and they are all customizable.

This tool does a nice job when it comes to album sharing. You only have to choose one album to be shared, or just put them all in share, and this program will create an file server, based on your IP number. The resulting link can be copied afterwards and sent to online friends, so they can view your photos as a web page. You can also upload your albums to your Internet page via FTP or SFTP, without having to install additional software. If you don't have a FTP account yet, JAlbum will help you create one!

Pluses: It's easy to use, it has many styles to choose from, it has support for more than 32 languages.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: This is a powerful program that you may find very handy.

version reviewed: 8.0