Jalbum Topics

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jAlbum is a great tool for photo and video clip albums. Not much to say about it here, but here are a couple of items.

Removing ads

As the tool has developed, somewhere along the way they made it ad supported, so that any page you create will pop up ads. For a $24 license, you can get rid of these ads. Well worth the price in my book.

Java heap error

As megapixel numbers have gone up, the image files I have processed have gotten bigger. My current camera (d200) is 10 megapixels, but some pictures I am getting from friends or relatives are as big as 24 megapixels. I was getting error messages from Jalbum that the Java virtual machine was running out of memory (heap error.) A web search revealed this simple fix:

Open the program files directory, and edit the jalbum.ini file with any text editor. 
You'll see a line that starts like this:

Virtual Machine Parameters=-Xms64M -Xmx700M ...

For the "-Xmx" attribute, change it to a larger value, like:

Virtual Machine Parameters=-Xms64M -Xmx1200M ...

Some details for windows 7

  • The file is in C:\Program Files (x86)\jAlbum
  • To modify the file, you have to open your text editor with "Run as Administrator"
  • I increased the heap size to 1200M, as suggested in the example, and this solved my problem.

Skin topics

jAlbum uses skins to create distinctive styles for web pages. I have played with creating my own skin, but as browsers have gotten more powerful, I have settled on a very nice one called Matrix.

Matrix

Matrix is based on a Java Script slide presentation API called Highslide. It handles both still photos and videos and even support background music for each page. There are a bunch of pre-defined styles that come with the skin, but I customize it to make the display cleaner, especially removing the 35mm slide metaphor that seems to be standard for the preset styles. I prefer a black background and minimal decoration so that the screen shows mostly real content and colors look natural. It is a little tricky to get access to the custom settings. The main trick is to choose "custom" under the skin's top level style menu in jAlbum. This reveals the customizing controls. The skin makes my preference easy by allowing me to use a "boxless" layout.