AlbumCreator

VIPBase offers a fully functional yet easy to use utility, called AlbumCreator, for creating web albums. See here for a sample album.

AlbumCreator stands itself out from other popular softwares or services of the same kind (such as PBase, Gallery, JAlbum and Picasa) in following ways:

Unlike server based solutions, AlbumCreator generates albums on your hard drive, so you can view and edit your albums locally without any scripting support.
Albums generated by AlbumCreator are pure html and jpeg files. The only thing you need to view the albums is your web browser. Because all links in the html files are relative links, uploading your albums onto any website is a no-brainer: you don't need to change anything.
AlbumCreator supports subfolders and the hierarchical structure of the source folder is completely preserved in the generated html files, which means you can navigate through the album just like what you do in a Windows explorer. AlbumCreator also provides a way to sequentially browse the whole album just by clicking the previous or the next link.
AlbumCreator automatically generates thumbnails for folders and images. You can set the title for each folder and image, or just use the folder or file name as the title. For each image, you can specify additional information such as date, place and detailed description of the image.
AlbumCreator can add watermark and frame to each image. It also supports displaying of EXIF information
AlbumCreator is super fast and extremely easy to use.

This is the interface of AlbumCreator. Most of items are straightforward and self-explained.

The following tutorial shows you how to create an album in three simple steps.

Step 1: Specify information about the album. (Items with * are required information.)
- Image and output folder: Image folder is the input folder where your images are stored. It can have subfolders. Output folder is the folder where the album will be saved. Initially it should be empty.
- Background: You can use a plain background with the color you specified. The color is 3 hex-pairs for red, green and blue. For example, white is "FFFFFF" and black is "000000". If you are not sure about this, just use white.
  Or you can use a background image (in GIF or JPEG format). The background image will be tiled to fill the whole visible area of your web browser.
- Image size: You may want to resize your images to a smaller size for two reasons: First, images with full resolution waste a lot of bandwidth for uploading and downloading and they are difficult to browse on a not so large screen. Second, you may want to protect your images (from being pirated) by keeping the full resolution version only to yourself. You can resize image either to a specified width or to a specified height. The other dimension will be resized proportionally.
  However, if you want to share the full resolution images anyway, just put zero in the box.
- Thumbnail size: Specify the size of thumbnails. Thumbnails with height of 120 pixels would be a good choice.
- Columns per row: Usually 4 thumbnails per row makes your pages look nicely spaced.
- HTML extension: When someone visits your album website (e.g. www.yourphoto.net), your hosting web server will automatically redirect this domain name to the root index page of your album, which is usually index.htm or index.html, depending on the web server's setting on the default extension of HTML files. If you know this setting, choose the right one, otherwise, choose either one. Just provide the full URL (e.g. www.yourphoto.net/index.htm or www.yourphoto.net/index.html) in the link to your website.
- Draw frame: If this option is on, AlbumCreator will draw a nice looking frame on each image. See one example here.
- EXIF: If this option is on, AlbumCreator will display the EXIF information (if there is any) on each image page. One example is shown here.
- Auto color: If this option is on, AlbumCreator will automatically adjusts the contrast and color of each image.
- Numbering: If this option is on, a unique index number for each image will be displayed on each image page.
- Show file name: If this option is on, the file name of each image will be displayed on each image page.
- Album title and Owner name: These information will be displayed in the title section as well as the copyright section of each page.
- Email: You can leave your contact email address, which will be displayed in the copyright section at the bottom of each page. If you don't want this email to be scanned by a spam email crawler, you can use an image (in GIF or JPEG format) of this address instead of text. AlbumCreator will decide whether this is an image file or real text.
- Watermark: You can specify a watermark image, which will be overlaid on the bottom-right corner of each image. Watermark image provides a way to claim your copyright of your photos by imposing information such as your name on the images. One example is shown here.
  The watermark image.
  
  The image being watermarked.
Step 2: Create thumbnail images and specify information about each image
After you provide all necessary information in the previous step, click the "Create Thumbnails" button. This will resize all images, generate thumbnail images and copy them to the output folder. If you have hundreds of images, this will take a while. The progress is displayed in a popup window.
After this is done, the information of each processed image will be displayed in the list bar of VIPBase, as shown below.

Now you have an opportunity to edit information such as the title, date, place and detailed description of each image. When you navigate through the image list using the UP and DOWN key, the current image will be displayed accordingly.
Tip: Instead of editing such information in VIPBase, you can do it a text editor.
1. Close the AlbumCreator by clicking the "Close" button. Click "Yes" to save setting.
2. Go to the output folder, you will find a text file with name "index_yyyy_mm_dd_hh_mm_ss.txt". Open it with your favorite text editor."
3. The file contains the same information as in the list bar. Edit it and save it.
4. Run AlbumCreator again and AlbumCreator will load the text file into the list bar.
Step 3: Create the album
After you are done with the editing, click the "Create Album" button to generate the html files. When finished, the album will be opened in your web browser.
Note that:
- AlbumCreator completely preserves the hierarchical structure of the source folder in the generated html files, which means you can navigate through the album just like what you do in a Windows explorer. For example, suppose we select "c:\photo" as the input folder and "c:\album" as the output folder. "C:\photo" contains the following images.
  The following figure illustrates the hierarchical structure of the input folder and the output folder after the album is created.
  For each image, three files are created: the resized image, the thumbnail image and the html file (called an image page). For each folder, an index page (shown in red) is created which shows the thumbnails of its images and subfolders.
  AlbumCreator sorts files in the same folder by name in ascending order. The thumbnail of the folder (except the root folder) is the thumbnail of the first image on the sorted list (shown in blue).
  On the top-left corner of each page (either folder index page or image page), the path from the root page to the current page is shown. So you clearly know where you are and you can go to any ancestor folder directly by click its link. Because AlbumCreator use relative path instead of absolute path, when you upload your album to a website, you don't need to change anything.
- AlbumCreator also provides a way to sequentially browse the whole album just by clicking the previous or the next link on each image page.

One sample album is here. Some screen shots of this album are shown as follows.

The index page of the root folder "c:\album".

The index page of "c:\album\Graz".

The image page of "c:\album\Graz\02.jpg".

The index page of "c:\album\Vien".

Last update: 08/01/2006 (check html)