I’ve ended up with the family albums from both of my parents’ families, and I want to share them with others in the families, who won’t be interested in the other sides. I’ve got them sorted out by major groups (e.g. people, times, places), and now it’s the sharing part.
In the past I used JAlbum to do this, but the prices have gotten wacky (and it’s subscription based) and my experience is that the sites JAlbum creates are often flakey and not really created with the intended purpose in mind, but to look flashy when browsing. I can easily self-host. I’d rather self-host.
I looked at Lightroom but it didn’t recognize folders when I used it, and it’s intensely frustrating to use as a web app (I guess I could rent it for a while?). Apple Photos might work but I don’t want to add hundreds of photos to the library only to find some limitation like not making subfolders. GraphicConverter from Lemkesoft doesn’t make subfolders/sub-albums as far as I can tell. Acorn and Pixelmator don’t seem to have any album html export.
Does anyone have any thoughts / suggestions? I tried searching through Tidbits but just came up with discussions from (I think) 2012 and 2019, and the ideas from 2012 are all gone from the Internet as far as I can tell.
Update: since renewing, I looked in the benefits section and tried maGalleryCreator. This also seems to have no support for sub-albums. I wonder if CS6 did?
I also tried Affinity Photo and DarkTable.
I’m a bit surprised this isn’t a more popular activity.
I’m a bit unclear how you want to share and what you mean by sub-albums…
You have printed-photo photo albums (like with prints behind adhesive plastic) and you’ve scanned all the original photos and sorted them in ‘groups’ (folders?).
Will you be sharing them by… Just looked up JAlbum and it seems to be an online gallery of sorts where others can view the images, is that how you want to do it? and you’re capable of self-hosting on your own home server or web site?
I just quickly pointed GraphicConverter 12 to a folder of images and in the top toolbar is an icon for “Catalog” which includes lots of options in creating html, including a reference to sub-folders. Perhaps look more into that and see if it is suitable. It also has some slide-show and perhaps movie options.
If you’re adept at html you might be able to build your own site and ftp it to a provider, and so on. Or create a WordPress.com (maybe still free for personal use?) site with a photo/slideshow/movie template. Or wordpress.org self-hosted, etc.
I haven’t done such a thing in ages, perhaps back to the 90s when I was first setting up web sites and learning html, so the above are ideas that have first popped into my puny head.
I may have missed the GraphicConverter control. I will check that now. WordPress is a complexity cannon ;)
I have large numbers of photos of family members, and I’ve sorted them into folders by branch, person, and unidentified context. JAlbum is pretty much what I’d like, except for the issues I’ve found. GraphicConverter … I will try again! Thanks, I can’t believe I missed that option.
Interesting. I just took a quick look at GC’s web catalog function for the first time in ages. I used it often in prehistoric days. At first glance, it successfully created a complete album for a folder and its subfolders in a single operation, though it didn’t separate the output into subfolders. I wonder of there is a setting buried somewhere. It might be worth looking in the manual or writing the developer. My experience has been that the developer is very responsive to questions.
I can ask him, but I went through and gave JAlbum a much more thorough look. I managed to find out that my old license was perpetual for versions 14 and 16 ;) and, to their credit, they had the software on their site. I tried opening the Java-only version and everything works “well enough.”
Helps that I have the Java Runtime installed, … I must have forgotten to remove it when Adobe CS6 stopped working!
Thanks for checking into it. Some good came of all this, I realized it was long past time to renew my Tidbits sub.
While I like GraphicConverter, my need for its special abilities is so rare I only tend to buy every few versions…
It’s interesting to me that it works for printed albums but not for html export, but from the sound of things, very, very few people ever want to do what I’m doing, and then we do it very rarely.
Yes, GC albums function pretty much as I remember it functioning years ago. Probably the last time I used it for HTML albums was version six or thereabouts. Glad to hear that J album worked for you. The joy of perpetual licenses!
