Album Shaper?
Exploring the Interface
Adding/Removing Collections
Adding/Removing Photos
Rearranging Items
Annotating Albums
Batch Image Effects
Image Editing Interface
Saving and Loading Albums
Saving and Loading Albums:
Saving and loading is performed through the file menu. Make sure your album has a name first, then select the save or save-as options to save your album. A save dialog will pop up if this is the first time you are saving the album or if you selected save-as. First, select the theme you wish to use for your HTML output on the left. All themes available on your system are displayed here. To the right are shown screenshots of the selected theme along with its short description. Themes may provide multiple screenshots. Use the left and right arrow buttons to flip through the selected themes screenshots. Once you are happy with your theme selection, navigate to the location on your disk you wish to save by using the browse button, or type the save destination directly in the text edit field at the bottom of the dialog, then select Save to save out your album. Albums can be quickly and easily be resaved using a different theme to their original location if desired.
Album Shaper will now save out your album. An HTML coverpage, and various other pages for each collection will be saved. What HTML files are actually written depends on what theme you used for saving out. The Classic and Slick themes save out an Album.html coverpage, with additional html files for collection coversheets and click-through slideshows. The album organization and all annotation will be saved in an XML file for furture loading, and all images will be copied into an image directory within the new directory being created. Original images will not be deleted or moved. A progress bar in the status bar will inform you of the progress of the save action and will disappear when the save action is complete. If this is the first time you are saving the album, or if you are saving to a new directory, the save operation may take a while. If only minor modifications have been applied to the album this process should be very quick. To make sure this process is as fast as it can be, make sure the Temporary Image Directory is on the same hard drive/partition you usually save your albums to. This option can be set under the Tools->Settings menu option.
In order to load an album, navigate to the directory that was created and load the Album.xml file. Images may be edited outside of Album Shaper inbetween uses, using other photo editing software. When reloaded, Album Shaper will autodetect such changes if configured properly and will recreate thumbnail and slideshow versions of modified images. These regenerated images will only be exported on the next save action. A progress bar will appear in the status bar when loading albums, and will disappear when the album has completely been loaded. Since checking for photo modifications is an expensive process and seldom necessary, this setting is disabled by default. It can be enabled under the Tools->Settings menu.