Easyalbum version 1.1 help
By Rutger Pancirov Cornelisse, 07-09-2010

About Easyalbum  Getting started  Only thumbs settings  No menu settings  Full 1 and full 2 settings  Tips  File trees 

Manual editing  Coming releases 




About Easyalbum
Easyalbum is a completely free program to make webgalleries in a couple of minutes. All you have to do is choose a layout, change the color schemes and borders and copy pictures to the project folder. Once that's done you just press a button and your gallery is done!
I admit, it's not the best tool around, but it's for free and extremely easy to use. Possible future releases will have more options.

Changed in Easyalbum v1.1:

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Getting started
To start using this program, all you need to do is copy it (whith all it's files and folders) to a location on your harddrive, thumbstick etc. Anyhow, it's important not to use this program from a read-only device (like cd), because it has to store additional information.

When you start the program it will ask you to create a new project, or to edit an existing project.
When creating a new project, you will have a choice from four layouts.

Layouts "full 1" and "full 2" are best suited for photo galleries that consist of multiple folders, for example for every vacation a different gallery inside one website. Every gallery can have it's own page and there will be a menu for navigation.

Layouts "no menu" and "only thumbs" don't support multiple pages and should therefore only be used if you wish to have only one gallery on the website.

The website name will be used as the name of the folder where your project will be stored. All project folders are stored in the folder "websites". E.g. if the program is stored in c:\easyalbum\ then the project folders are stored in c:\easyalbum\websites\. and the website in c:\easyalbum\websites\project name\web\.

CAUTION!: Once the settings above are made, they cannot be changed!

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Only thumbs settings
The simplest layout is "only thumbs". This will create a single page with thumbnails, no menu and no header and footer. The only options are colors, title, borders and background image.
To acces the thumbnail layout dialog, click on the picture in the upperright corner of the main window.

The color codes have to be given in hexadecimal RGB values, two digits per color (RRGGBB).
Valid border types are: none, dotted, dashed, solid, double, groove, ridge, inset and outset.

Once the initial project has been created, you can start copying the pictures to the project folder.
Thumbnails should be named thumb1.jpg, thumb2.jpg,..., thumbn.jpg and placed in the folder
websites\project name \web\thumbs\. It's recommended to use a maximum thumbnail size of 130x130 pixels and a minimum of 100x100 pixels.
Pictures should be named image1.jpg,..., imagen.jpg and I recommend them not to be larger than 800x800 pixels. pictures should be copied to the folder websites\project name\web\images\.

Of course the thumbnail of a picture should have the same number and there should be no gaps between the numbers!
The easiest way of preparing the pictures is by using a jpg batch-resizer, with which you can easily change both the name and resolution in one go.

When all the images are in place, you can press the button "Update website", which will create the gallery. When creating the gallery, the previous version will be erased. As long as you don't press the button "Update website", the gallery will be untouched.

To add a background image for the page, press "Page bg img". A dialog will pop up, in which you can specify the image to use as a background. The selected image will be copied to the graphics folder.
Valid background repeat values are: repeat, no-repeat, repeat-x, repeat-y
Valid background positions are: left top, left center, left bottom, center top, center center, center bottom, right top, right center, right bottom
If you wish not to use a background image, press "no image".

Note: if you set a background image and later press "no image", the image file will not be deleted from the graphics folder.

To set the background of the thumbnails area, press "Background image..." in the thumbnail properties window.

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No menu settings
This layout is almost the same as "onlythumbs", the difference is that it has a header and a footer bar. Read "only thumbs settings" first.

To edit the header or footer settings, click on the header or footer rectangle on the picture in the upperright corner of the main window.

This will open the header/footer properties dialog, in which you can change the settings. The left side is the same as in "only thumbs". On the right side you can specify the font face, size and color used in the header/footer. In the field "text" you can type the text you want to show up.
Tip: in the text field you can enter HTML tags, so you can further format the text properties and position.

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Full 1 and full 2 settings
These layouts work pretty much in the same way as "No menu", but they have a menu as an added feature.
When starting a project, the main page (home) will be set. The home page will not be used as a gallery.
By clicking "add page" a new gallery page will be made. The name of the page will also be the name of the link in the menu. THIS NAME CANNOT BE CHANGED AFTERWARDS! The new page will be set with the settings of the home page, but the settings can be changed at any given time.

To add a page click "Add page".

To change the editor to another page click "Change page".

By clicking "Update menus", links for all the pages in the project will be added to the pages that have already been built. Only the menu items will be updated, all the other data in the HTML and CSS files will remain the same.

If you click "Update page", only the current page in the editor will be updated.

With clicking "Update site", all the pages in the current project will be updated.

Note: After adding one or more new pages, all the pages have to be updated in order to have the links show up in the menu on every page.

The left side of the menu properties window is the same as the header properties window. On the left side you can choose the font face, color and size and background color for the links. You can also set the colors for mouse-over action.

Adding thumbnails and pictures goes in the same way as for "Only thumbs", but you should take care of copying the files to the ..web\galleries\gallery name\thumbs\ and ..web\galleries\gallery name\images\ folders.

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Tips

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File trees

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Manual editing
Every page of the website has its own stylesheet.css, simple_popup.js and graphics files. This is done to allow every page to be different from the other.
The div classes are as follows:

It's higly recommended to leave manual editing for the end of creating an album. After manual editing your changes will be lost when you rebuild the page in Easyalbum.

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Coming releases

Easyalbum v1.2: More userfriendlyness (for now the final planned release)

This is a big update, so it will take some time to finish.

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