Table Of Contents

1. I'm getting errors!
2. My thumbnails are cropped!
3. I get: "album: No such file or directory"?
4. Why are my thumbnails stretched?
5. My thumbnails are too big
6. I don't want to have to regenerate all my albums when I add photos
7. My index pages are too large!
8. I want thumbnails on my directories!
9. ERROR: no delegate for this image format (./album)
10. ERROR: no delegate for this image format (some_non_image_file)
11. ERROR: no delegate for this image format (some.jpg)
12. ERROR: identify: JPEG library is not available (some.jpg)
13. ERROR: Can't get [some_image] size from -verbose output.

1:   I'm getting errors!
Well, that's not enough information.  First run album with "-d" to see what's
happening, and if you can't figure out the problem from that, check this page
to see if your error is mentioned here.  If not, then you can send me
the following information:
1) The error (all of the output from "album -d")
2) Your operating system
3) The version of ImageMagick (first line from "convert -h")

2:   My thumbnails are cropped!
No kidding, that's one of the reasons why I wrote album.

There are three ways to handle thumbnails:

1)  Have varying aspect ratios (different size rectangles)
2)  Stretch them to fit the same aspect ratio
3)  Crop them to fit the same aspect ratio.

I couldn't stand the way #1 and #2 look, and I couldn't find a tool that
did #3, so I wrote it myself.  It looked even better than I expected, with
the cropped areas not being very important, and with the cropping
directives, you can fix most of the other thumbnails.

If you don't want your thumbnails cropped, you have two options:

1)  Use the album option: -no_crop
2)  Use a different photo album generator.

I added the -no_crop option because it was easy to do, but it screws up
many of the themes which were written so that they expected all thumbnails
to be the same size.

If you must have -no_crop, then check out the No_Crop theme,
or modify another theme to support it.

I've realized since I've bought a digital camera that having different
aspect sizes isn't so bad with digital cams, since they use only two
aspect ratios (portrait/landscape).  So maybe someday I'll have time and
I'll make that situation work better.

3:   I get: "album: No such file or directory"?

1) Try specifying the full path to album, such as:

% ./album

Or

% /usr/local/bin/album

2) Make sure perl is installed according to the first line of album

3) If you save the perl scripts as text from IE, it may screwup the
   line breaks, save as source.

4:   Why are my thumbnails stretched?
If you used an older version of album (which had a previous thumbnail
geometry of 100x100) or if you specify a different thumbnail geometry,
then you will need to force album to regenerate any thumbnails that it
has already created:

  % album -force ...

It's slow, but you only need to do this once for each geometry change.

5:   My thumbnails are too big
Some cameras store thumbnails in the profile info of the images,
and this gets saved by convert when it creates new images.  One
solution is to try adding:

% album --scale_opts +profile \\\* -- 

Some versions of album will complain with this.  You can also try (on UNIX):

% album --scale_opts -profile /dev/null -- ....

On non-UNIX, you can just an empty file instead of "/dev/null"

You can also do this to your medium images with --med_scale_opts.

If that doesn't make your thumbnails small enough, you can lower the
quality with something like:

% album --scale_opts -quality 5 -- ....

You can combine the --scale_opts as well:

% album --scale_opts +profile \\\* -quality 5 -- ....

6:   I don't want to have to regenerate all my albums when I add photos
Great, neither do I.

First of all, unless you specify -force, album won't generate new medium
or thumbnail images, it will only generate new HTML.  But this can take
time, and can also be avoided.

If you handle albums like me, then new photos go into a new directory
which is placed in an album with other subalbums (that are already
generated).  To update the new directory (with the proper parent album
links and theme) and add it to the top directory, you can do:

  % album photos -add photos/new_vacation_pictures

7:   My index pages are too large!
I get many requests to break up the index pages after reaching a certain
threshold of images.

The problem is that this is hard to manage - unless the index pages are
treated just like sub-albums, then you now have three major components
on a page, more indexes, more albums, and thumbnails.  And not only is
that cumbersome, but it would require updating all the themes.

Hopefully the next major release of album will do this, but until then
there is another, easier solution - just break the images up into
subdirectories before running album.

I have a tool that will move new images into subdirectories for you and
then runs album:
  in_album

8:   I want thumbnails on my directories!
Second most frequent feature request.  Coming with the next major release.

9:   ERROR: no delegate for this image format (./album)
You have the album script in your photo directory and it can't make
a thumbnail of itself!  Either:
1) Move album out of the photo directory (suggested)
2) Run album with -known_images

10:  ERROR: no delegate for this image format (some_non_image_file)
Don't put non-images in your photo directory, or else run with -known_images

11:  ERROR: no delegate for this image format (some.jpg)
12:  ERROR: identify: JPEG library is not available (some.jpg)
Your ImageMagick installation isn't complete and doesn't know how
to handle the given image type.

13:  ERROR: Can't get [some_image] size from -verbose output.
ImageMagick doesn't know the size of the image specified.  Either:
1) Your ImageMagick installation isn't complete and can't handle the image type.
2) You are running album on a directory with non-images in it without
   using the -known_images option.

If you're a gentoo linux user and you see this error, then run this command
as root (thanks Alex Pientka):

  USE="avi gif jpeg mpeg png quicktime tiff" emerge imagemagick

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