 This is one of
several applications included in the Fun With
Freeware 1 collection that stores information about images, rather than the
images themselves, so that you can view your image collection easily when you
want to but the album uses little space when not in use.
 Instead
of duplicating images and retaining copies of them within its own program files,
Album 1.6 catalogues the images in a location you specify and retains only the
details of the images and whereabouts in the album you wish to find them
when next you open it.
To quote the introduction to author Renate Schaaf's Help manual:
"Now that you have all these digital images on your hard disks and CD Roms, maybe you'd like to have a way to show them to friends and family like you used to show a scrapbook or a photo album: page by page on a nice background with descriptions, so the pictures can actually tell a story.
Album has been written originally for my own use, in order to achieve this in a way involving a
minimal amount of hassle, but with a pleasant looking result. Pick a group of image files on your disks, sort them on a light table, add title, descriptions, pick fonts, colors, background, save to an album (*.alb) file, and you're ready to show this group anytime.
Scanned images might have all kinds of different pixel sizes. Album can automatically scale them so they plus their description fit optimally on one album page. (But alternatively you can also tell it to use the original image size, or a fixed width or height.) So far it only displays one image per page with an optional thumbnail view of the others to the left. There might be more customizable displays in a future version.
Often you have images with a common topic which you would like to display in one group, but they reside in different folders. With Album, you only have to pick the initial picture group from one folder, then you can add to the selection from any other folder you want.
While doing all the above, Album does not change your image files or their location. The *.alb files only save the locations of your images, their descriptions and other options, like fonts and colors. You can send these files to notepad to view them, they are just plain text. Also, Album does not generate databases for the thumbnails of your images, it does them from scratch each time you load an album. All this has to do with the my own distaste for applications which use
hard disk space with the chance of the user not noticing."
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This is one of
several applications included in the Fun With
Freeware 1 collection that stores information about images, rather than the
images themselves, so that you can view your image collection easily when you
want to but the album uses little space when not in use.
