Using BluPlusPlus
Using BluPlusPlus (or any JAlbum skin) is a little like getting dressed in the morning—pick the right combination of items from your closet and you’ll look smashing. On the other hand....
Because of its great flexibility, BPP has many ways of enhancing the look of your photo albums. However, many combinations of options will yield poor results. Although reading this documentation will help you make those choices, there is really no substitute for experimentation. Creating a small test folder of a few images will allow you to test to your heart’s content without spending too much time waiting for the albums to be generated. For a test album, five to ten photos should suffice to give a good sense of how an album will look. Hint: To speed up album generation for test albums, deselect the “high quality scaling” option on JAlbum’s Settings-Images tab, and on the JAlbum Settings-Advanced-Metadata tab, uncheck the ‘Extract photographic data’. Also, on the JAlbum Settings-Navigation tab, be sure to select the ‘Link to scaled-down images only’ radio button.
Changing how a generated album looks can be done by choosing JAlbum options (universal with all skins) and by choosing BPP-specific items to alter.
There are several fundamental choices to be made in BPP:
- Choose a BluPlusPlus style and an icon set to match
- Choose a frame type and specify a size and a color for the chosen frame (if the frame selected allows for different sizes or colors)
BPP provides many, many more options. These options fall into two categories:
- additional information to become a part of the generated album
- customizing the look and feel of the generated album by selecting from the many options available on the various BluPlusPlus tabs