JAlbum: Box, camera and screen not includedIn these Net 2.0 days of flickr, Imageshack, Yahoo photos and so on, it might seem like it's never been easier to publish your home snaps. That's probably because it's true. However, easy doesn't always equal perfect. Sometimes you might want to have a web-traditional photo gallery on your own website, so you have full control over addresses, formatting, content, size and so on.

If you do, then rather than resize 100 pictures, generate thumbnails, write out the html code for inserting 100 pictures and so forth you really could do with getting a program to do that for you. The Poorhouse has recently discovered and would like to recommend JAlbum. It's far from the only program out there but its big array of features and the fact that you can use the drag 'n' drop default options to get a decent album in seconds or (apparently) customise in almost every way the appearance, style and behaviour of your album makes it the favourite so far.

It will thumbnail images to any size, link to larger pictures of any size, support EXIF information, allow nested galleries and publish straight to web via (S)FTP. It comes with quite a few decent looking templates and is near infinitely customisable to your own requirements. There is also a JAlbum Skin Repository for you to download or share works-of-album-template-art with other users, ranging from the basic to super-fancy Flash albums. It can run your photos through image filters - for instance, you can automatically add a watermark each of your images. It can link to external print services to get your photos printed.

Two last bits of goodness: it's written in Java so works on lots of computers systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. And, best of all, it's free. Say no more.

The (standard) output files of the program are pure HTML, so even the most basic webserver package should be able to handle showing your dodgy home snaps to the international community. No scripting facility needed. On the downside this technique of album generation is most suited to albums that won't change too much. This is because every time you want to make a change to the album you basically have to rebuild it on your computer. This might only take seconds, but isn't the most portable or convenient solution if you constantly update your albums with new pictures. If you are more after scripts to make more interactive website photo albums (requiring some server scripting support such as PHP) then go search somewhere like the no-need-to-reinvent-the-wheel advocates favourite site, Hotscripts.

Finally let it be stated that the default icon for a JAlbum file is a particularly colourful and cheery frog.