A while back I had a conversation with a friend who asked what he could do to show his family album to the many family members who had not seen it. He asked if he should attempt to e-mail all the pictures and movie files to his relatives.

My answer was that it would probably take forever to send such an e-mail and take even longer for the recipients to actually receive it, especially if they happened to still be using a dial-up connection. So what was the answer?

How about putting your entire album and movie files on the web? Good answer, but how can you accomplish such a seemingly formidable task? It's easy........read on.

Over the last few years there have been several companies, including Galleria Software, Xydot, and JAlbum that have designed and released "Photo Album Publishing Software".

Web Album Creator 3.02 by Galleria Software. Free 30 day trial - For Personal and Business Use $24.95. Download here.

Album gv 2.0 by Xydot. Free 30 day trial period; if you like it then buy a license key for $38. Download here.

JAlbum 3.5 by JAlbum. Free. Download here.

They all work similarly with the same basic type of user interfaces. They create thumbnails that the viewer can then click on for a larger view. They allow you to customize the look of your album. They are all dowloadable software and they are all rather simple to use.

We here at NetListings like the JAlbum for both Macs and PCs. JAlbum, first of all, is totally free and we have always loved free. Secondarily, it makes it very easy to create pages of thumbnails that are ready for the Web by dragging and dropping your photos and movies into the program.

Just how easy is it really? Simply drop your folder containing image and movie files onto JAlbum and press "Make album". JAlbum will create thumbnails of your images and display them in html index pages. You can also have JAlbum produce a slide show of your images for easy navigation one at a time. The output may contain scaled-down versions of the original images. Clicking on these images may bring up the original image (for printing etc). JAlbum does not touch or modify your original images in any way. It just adds some files and folders to the image folder you specify during web creation. JAlbum supports jpeg, gif and png image files and popular movie formats like .avi, .mpg and .wmv

You can easily choose the basic look of the created album through the user interface of JAlbum (color scheme, dimensions, navigation button layout etc) by selecting from a list of ready-made "skins" and styles (variations to a skin), or you can create your own skins.

JAlbum comes with an integrated smart FTP client with synchronization ability so that publishing your album on the Internet is a snap.

JAlbum supports deep hierachies of image folders. Each folder is represented by a folder icon on the resulting web page. You can easily organize thousands of images.

Image filters can be plugged in to enhance images during album generation, adding watermarking, logos etc.

Because it's Java, JAlbum runs everywhere: Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX, OS/2, eComStation... any platform that supports Java 1.3

It's free. No expiration dates. No nag screens. No guilty conscience. Download it here.