How Well Does JAlbum Work with WP and BH?

[skeezix]

After searching through this forum a bit for "the best image gallery", I found EarlyOut's preference for JAlbum. Seems like it will do what I want, mainly because it is a local application and when I'm done I guess I just ftp the images to my website here on BH. But I do have a couple of application-type questions before I get JAlbum.

1. Does JAlbum integrate well with a WordPress blog that lives here on BH? I would like to insert links into my WordPress blog/website that would take users to the image gallery. No magic in this, right? Just insert the link to somewhere and when the user clicks the link he will be presented with a bunch of thumbnails and then he goes from there.... ?

2. The stuff my search turned up came from earlier in 2007. JAlbum still is highly rated or has something else become available that is better suited for a SIMPLE image gallery??

[Early Out]

Full disclosure - visit the JAlbum user forums, and a suspiciously familiar name, i.e., mine, will pop up very quickly. I've also designed my own skin for JAlbum - check the website for it (http://matrix.earlyout.org/), and take a look at the sample album. Or visit my main website (http://jefftucker.org/) for another example.

For my money, JAlbum (http://jalbum.net) is still the premier, easy-to-use, no-complicated-server-side-scripting photo album software. You run it on your PC, and it produces all the files necessary for a finished photo album. It's got a built-in FTP client, or you can use your own to upload everything to your BH space.

Things only start getting tricky if you try to incorporate a guestbook or PayPal. (Lecture about why a guestbook is a terrible idea reserved for later.) And if you want to do something unusual, and can't work it out, the user forums over there are the absolute best - lots of help, including regular attention from the JAlbum and skin developers (well, the most popular skins, at least - with some of the lesser-used ones, you're on your own).

To link from any other application, like WordPress, you would just upload your finished JAlbum to a subdirectory, and plunk a link to it into your main index page.

To top it all off, you can't beat the price (free).

[skeezix]

A comprehensive, informative, and well-written reply, as usual!

BTW (and just a long-shot): Do you use Irfanview or JRiver Media Center to organize your images on your PC?

[Early Out]

BTW (and just a long-shot): Do you use Irfanview or JRiver Media Center to organize your images on your PC?Nope. Since my images tend to fall into easy categories by themselves (all the shots from a trip, or all the family photos from a certain decade or from an event, like a wedding), I don't need to use any tools beyond Windows Explorer to organize things.

One absolute rule of thumb, however, is that the images straight from the camera go into read-only directories. When it's time to use them in an album, I copy the ones I want into a "staging" directory for the album. Those get tweaked with Picasa, with the tweaked versions copied into a "source" directory for the album. Disk space is cheap, and keeping things organized like this means that I can always undo my changes, or go back and fine-tune the tweaking.