XML Photo Album

General Information

What XML Album is

XML Photo Album is a free, open-source two-component program for archiving and displaying digital photos. There is a generator program to create and organize albums, and display files to allow the albums to be viewed with any web browser which supports Javscript and XSLT (most modern browsers can do this), so no special software is needed for display. These albums can be archived on CDs and hard drives or posted on the web, and are easy to update and change, with the generator program or even by hand. Using the generator, files are added to the album folder and thumbnails are generated automatically (though you can turn that off if it suits your fancy). Also, the generator will automatically read the dates embedded in images by most digital cameras, and can downsample images as you add them for more convenient web display. We pride ourselves on an especially lean album size: the files used to display the album add only 40kb to the space taken up by the image files, regardless of how large the album is.

What XML Photo Album is not

• XML Photo Album is not a webserver. It's just XML, with XSL and Javascript to tell web browsers how to display it.
• It is not an upload manager. It cannot manage a website in any way. If you want to post an album made with this system online, you have to manually upload the album files and the images.
• XML Photo Album is not hard to use! Just run the AlbumGenerator.exe application, choose a folder where you want to keep the album, and start adding images. When you're ready, copy the whole folder to wherever you want to keep it (or leave it were it is) and open the index page (index.xml) in a web browser to view the album.

Details

XML Photo Album consists of the archiving program, the Album Generator (written in Visual Basic.NET) which can be used to link data such as title, caption, date, location, and photographer to photos. The photos can be put in any order or sorted by date. The program generates an XML file containing all this data. The second component is a collection of files that, given an XML database, displays the photos as an album in a web browser. The album data can be changed at any time, either by reloading the album into the Album Generator and changing entries, or by manually changing the XML. Any changes to the XML will immediately be reflected in the display. To see the display format, view the Sample Album. To see what the Album Generator interface looks like, look at the screenshots on SourceForge.

System Requirements:

Album Generator:
Microsoft Windows 98 or later, with the .NET framework version 2.0 installed. Because this program must load many images, often very large ones, a minimum of 24mb of free RAM is recommended.

Versions 1.6 and later are almost completely compatible with Mono 2.2 on Linux. Some older versions of the generator may run on Linux with Mono, but are not completely stable. See the Linux readme for details. Mono must be compiled with Visual Basic.

Display system:
Any web browser which supports Javscript and XSLT (Internet Explorer 6+ or Mozilla Firefox 2+ recommended, but Opera 9+ and Google Chrome 1+ also work). Other browsers and older versions of these browsers may not work.

For more details, see the readme file for a brief overview, or the help file for a complete list of all the features. For non-Windows users, it is relatively simple to manually create an XML database that can be interpreted by the display system (or to write your own program to do so.) If this is you, you'll need to know the XML Database Format that we use.

Latest News

September 13, 2010 - It has come to our attention that a "security feature" in Chrome 5+ breaks the display of albums stored on the local machine (albums viewed over the web still work fine). Unless and until Chrome is fixed to correct this problem, we can only recommend using a different browser to view locally stored albums. Using the IE Tab in Chrome is probably the easiest work-around.

April 20, 2010 - A user's feature requests spurred us to create v1.7.0, which generally increases customizability. We have repackaged our set of display files as a "web display theme," and adjusted the Album Generator to make it easy for users to create alternate themes (with different colors, layouts, backgrounds etc.) and apply different themes to different albums. We have supplied a Spanish language web display theme as an example. Also, you can now specify default settings in the generator which will be applied to all new albums. As usual, see the changelog for a complete list of changes. We're still planning to implement the master indexer project eventually, but not today.

Coming eventually:

• The Master Album Indexer: Create a master index page that links to all of your albums.
• A method for translating the GUI.