JAlbum is the piece of software, I use to build my photo album and video album. I feel, it is a easy way of building the digital album for web publishing and will stick to it till I find something better. To build an album using JAlbum, what I need to do is to put all my photos under a directory and organise them under various subdirectories. These subdirectories are named as the album names and run the JAlbum to create the corresponding album. JAlbum keeps the presentation layer different from the data layer. This means that you can choose any skin and apply it to your album and keep it changing as and when you want. It is just a matter of selecting a different skin and hitting the rebuild button. I am not going to list all the great features of JAlbum here, go to the home page of JAlbum and look it yourself - it is beautiful piece of software.

Building Photo Album

Though I have tried handful of different skins for the photo album but happen to like chameleon owing to its elegance and balanced features. While building the photo album, in most of the cases, the default options are quite acceptable but in course of time I have learned that:

• Personally, I build my album twice. One using flash based skin and another one using plain old html. Once I choose a flash based skin for my album and realised that the guys in some university can't view it. As plain old html is the safest bet, I make sure that I have a version of album published without depending on flash. My current choice of flash based skin is BananaAlbum.
• Sharpening the photos have always made my photos look bad. I keep it to zero.
• The more you increase the quality of the JPEG, the bigger is the size of the file making your album slower on the web. To make a balance between the quality of photo and speed of the album, I have choosen 80% mark. Forgot to mention that I choose a image size of 640x640.
• I don't provide the link to download the full quality photos. For family and friends, I have an alternate url to download the photos masked by a username and password.

Building Video Album

To publish my video album I choose to make it flash based owing to the increasing support of the flash across browsers and various operating systems. Even though, I like the BananaAlbum but at the time of writing this page the support for flash video in BananaAlbum was quite experimental and hence, I couldn't use the BananaAlbum for my video album. It didn't took me long to figure out that FotoPlayer will be my skin to present my video album.

I capture my home videos and archive it in mpeg2 format. To convert the mpeg video to flash video (*.flv), I use FFMpeg. The exact syntax is shown below. This converts the original video of size 720x576 to 240x192. I find the playback quality quite satisfactory over slow connections as well.

 ffmpeg -i pankhuri-nursery-rhymes.mpeg -ar 11025 -ab 32 -f flv \
 -s 240x192 pankhuri-nursery-rhymes.flv

Further, to extract the thumbnail for the video I use the following command:

 ffmpeg -i pankhuri-nursery-rhymes.mpeg -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an \
 -f rawvideo -s 60x48 pankhuri-nursery-rhymes.THM

FotoPlayer needs a thumbnail file, having the same name as the flv video file, to be present in the same directory to show it as a video thumbnail during album generation. Please note that the thumbnail file must have the extension as .THM (in capitals not .thm - it didn't work for me when I used the thumbnail extension as .thm).