 Tips & Tricks |
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| home » Tips and tricks » Combining Existing Albums Tips & Tricks Combining Existing Albums Into One Master Album It can easily become too great a task to create a complex arrangement of albums, utilising different styles, layouts and even skins, in one large project. However, it is very easy to produce many separate albums, each optimised to suit the particular album's content. It is then that the question arises; how to combine these existing albums into one master album? Also, updating a complex album when new material is added can be an issue. It is desirable not to rebuild the entire album when a new sub-album is added, but to handle these separately and then just re-build the top-level, master album. See the other tutorial. This details one particular technique, and gives a few of the common drawbacks that inevitably result from linking pre-existing albums. This tutorial also discusses how to effectively combine individually-created albums together under one master index …. ie create a top-level Master Album that provides a single point of entry into many albums. A number of alternative methods are presented. It is sensible and logical to organise JAlbum folders into Input and Output , such that source data generally resides in the former, and all albums are created in the latter. This inherently enables simple methods for linking albums and is strongly recommended. A third element to be considered is the JAlbum Project data (files like .jap, albumfiles.txt, comments.properties, meta.properties, header.inc, footer.inc etc). These may exist in separate folders, with the source data or even with the output albums. Please note: JAlbum's "virtual album structure" allows for a quite complicated arrangement of source folders. Also, output albums may be located in various places. It is outside the intent of this tutorial to directly account for all these situations, though the guidelines laid out further on are generally applicable. It is also important to appreciate that every now and then, an album's output data may need to be deleted entirely (for house-cleaning purposes before uploading to a web-site, or to resolve a build issue) so it is deemed important to avoid placing any important files in the Output sub-folders, ie in the already created albums. So, there are 4 fundamental techniques:
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