by: Matt Beckwith, Associate Editor

Just like a lot of other typical Mac users, my family and I take a lot of pictures and we enjoy sharing them with friends and family all over the world via our personal website.

I love iPhoto and even somewhat like iWeb but I don’t like using their photo publishing features – I’m always left wanting more control over the look of the page. In my never ending quest to find simpler ways to upload pictures to our website I was turned on to an awesome (and free) application.

JAlbum is a great application for publishing pictures to your website. The skins are beautiful and most give you a ton of options that you won’t find in iPhoto or iWeb.

The skin I chose to use was Chameleon. This option had a lot of color choices and the most customization choices. Using this skin, it was very easy to add watermarks or logos to my images as well as external links from the html pages. I also really like having the ability to automatically add data such as what camera I used, and image resolution and file size. The application also allows me to link to full size images, as well as my normal, scaled down images.

The greatest feature within JAlbum is the integrated FTP client. Once I’ve created my new album, I can publish right from the application (and browse my web space) which makes JAlbum the quickest way to go from camera to web!

The only downside I discovered with JAlbum was the way it handled comments I placed on my images. I could not find a way to import comments I made to my images from iPhoto. Although JAlbum makes it super easy to add comments within the application, I found that I needed to edit these comments each time I made a change to the album or my comments would no longer appear with the image pages.

All in all, JAlbum is an awesome and easy-to-use application. With dynamic options that are well organized and easy to understand I was quickly able to go through the application rather than hunt through help files. Give it a try. If you do, share it with the rest of us by posting a link in the comments.

Click here to see the page I put together this morning.