At night I don a cape, tights, and a mask to fight crime. During the day I’m a mild mannered recommender of Mac apps. One of the easiest apps to recommend is one that creates photo albums. Web, CD, or DVD, stunning photo albums are just a few clicks with this free Mac app.
The Browser Photo Gallery
jAlbum is a free and simple app that takes a folder of photos and turns them into a dynamic photo album or gallery. The end result is an attractive way to view a dozen or many hundreds of photos on the web, or in a browser window on your Mac (or a Windows PC).
Open jAlbum and drag a folder of photos onto the app.
That’s it. Except for one more thing. Select an album skin, then click the Make Album button. The variety of skins and albums make for many different versions of albums and galleries and all can be customized.
jAlbum comes with dozens of options to fully customize and album or gallery. Entire albums can be uploaded to a web site with all links to each photo properly embedded.
If jAlbum is free, how does it maintain itself? jAlbum unlicensed is free. The commercial pro license comes with a hefty price tag, support, professional level skins (shopping cart integration, for example), and ad free albums when using jAlbum’s online storage subscription service (free for 30 days, then $2.50 to $10 a month).
The free version is not a stripped down album creator, though, so it’s simple enough to try it out first. How does it compare to the albums created by iPhoto? It’s apples to oranges, so to speak. jAlbum doesn’t do a QuickTime movie export. But iPhoto albums don’t look at attractive or as professional as jAlbum.