Annotated Album Skin:
Further Information on Options and Functionality

Album title
    The album title will be the title specified in the AnnotatedAlbum tab of the JAlbum program. If no title is specified there, the title will come from the properties textfile, "meta.properties," if it exists in the output directory (folder) and has a line "title = an alternative title" (perhaps the only line in the file). Otherwise, the album title will be the directory name. Note that this title can be fairly long and can include HTML. This provides a way to display information (e.g., background) relevant to all the images in the album, in addition to the literal title. This title information appears in the top middle of the first thumbnail index page; if it is long, you may have to scroll to see the thumbnails in the bottom row of this first page.

Importing comments entered in JAlbum Edit tab, ACDSee, etc.
    You can import comments stored in comments.properties (entered, for example, in the JAlbum Edit tab), as well as comments stored in descript.ion (entered by such programs as ACDSee, STGThumb and Fookes Album Express). By default, these imported comments go into the headings of descriptions and thus appear as captions on the thumbnail index page. If you want these comments to go into description bodies, make the minor change described near the beginning of index.htt.

Linking to slide pages from outside an album
    If you want to link to a standard slide page that looks like part of an album, link to ImageName.html in the slides directory of the album. If you want to link to a slide page which is formatted to de-emphasize that it is part of an album, link to ImageName_1.html in the slides directory; this page will not have previous and next slide buttons but will have a thumbnail index button labeled "Related images." Note that search engines (e.g., Google) will generate links to the description ImageName.htm(l) in the album directory itself; if this description has been generated by the Annotated Album skin and is loaded in isolation (i.e., not accompanied by the image it describes), it will replace itself with the ImageName_1.html slide page having the modified format just described.

Including non-local images in an album
    By default, JAlbum includes all images in the specified image directory when making an album. JAlbum gives you the option of specifying explicitly what images should be included in the album, for example, via the Edit tab. The information about which files to include and their order is stored in albumfiles.txt in the image directory. If you manually edit albumfiles.txt and specify a non-local image, i.e., an image that is not in the current image directory but is in some other directory, the Annotated Album skin will look for a non-local description of this image in this other directory. However, if you edit this description, the result is stored locally (in the output directory), and from that time forward, the local description will be used. This functionality is exploited by the image repository strategy noted below.

A strategy for generating Annotated Albums based on an image repository

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