Since I dont post here often…I figure I’d make this one really, really long to make up for lost time.

I finally got tired of making webalbums in somebody else’s paradigm. Not that they weren’t great programs, but I’m stubborn and didn’t want to change my own workflow. This is how I work with pictures:

• Download pictures from camera into directories based on the date that the picture was taken
• Select the pictures I want, copy them to a directory made public by my webserver
• Write captions
• Link all the pictures together with quasi-fancy html

To do this I had to select the pictures with the normal folder system of windows, which isn’t bad and then use some other program to write captions and generate html.

In the beginning, there was Album Express. It was nice, but the albums didn’t use CSS and it cost $25.

Then came the age of SnipSnap. We wrote our own macro to fit into the SnipSnap paradigm. This was nice, but it didn’t have captions, alas we could not describe our photos to our friends.

I turned my eyes to JAlbum next. It was very nice, you could add captions and make very pretty albums with lots of data. Very professional. However, you still had to pick your pictures using Windows explorer and copy them over yourself. Once you had done that, you couldn’t nix a picture you changed your mind about sharing.

Then I found Picasa, which is really, really pretty. It easily lets you create albums while keeping your precious archive intact. However, there are no captions! They do keywords and all, but no friggin captions! Another sad thing is that you can’t parse the albums that Picasa generates. Which means that you’re stuck using their album formats.

The last such program that I found before I wrote my own, was Web Album Generator. It generated very simple, but elegant albums using CSS, but like JAlbum, once you selected a directory, you had to use all the pictures in there.

So finally, I got off my duff and wrote my own album generating software!

Introducing: ** MAlbum: **Maulik’s Album app

(there’s also a mirror here on Snarfed)

And folks, all seriousness aside, let me tell you, it slices and it dices, it’s the greatest thing to happen to digital picture taking since the digital camera itself :-P LOL

Here’s what it does do:

I understands that maybe a data packrat, and would never want to throw away a single picture you’ve taken. So, you add a folder from your archive, maybe two (one pre-midnight, one post midnight).

You start tabbing through the pictures and you see a picture that deserves a caption. Type it in and keep on tabbing. See one you don’t want the world to see, hit ctrl-del, it’s outta the family (but still in your archive). When you’re done, you pick the directory where the album should live, say in the one that your webserver makes public, and hit “make the album”. And now your time with MAlbum is done.

Think me a geek? You’re right my friend … you’re so right :-P

Maulik