Web Album

A Web Album is a web page that contains a collection of graphics arranged in a specific layout. Actual Drawing has a tool called Web Album that lets you automate complex tasks of inserting graphics, creating thumbnails (a miniature representation of a picture, usually containing a hyperlink to a full-sized original picture), and setting proper hyperlinks to the original pictures.

Creating Web Album

1. Select Create Web Album from the Tools menu.
2. The Web Album dialog box appears.

Selecting files for Web Album

Click Add Files.... Specify a file in the Open dialog box and click Open.

To add multiple or all the files in a specific folder, click Add Files... and hold the Ctrl button when you select files, then click Open.

Your Web page will display thumbnails of these files in the order that they appear in the list. To change order of the files, select a file whose order should be changed and click the Up or Down button.

To remove a file from the list, select the file and click Remove File.

• Click the Next button to go to the next step of the Web Album creation.

Web Page and Thumbnail properties

Click the Background Color button to change page color.

To make all the thumbnails the same size, specify Width and Height of the thumbnails.

If you want to keep the width/height ratio of the original images, click to select the Maintain Aspect Ratio check box.

The Resample Process radio buttons allow you to specify the quality of thumbnails. Anti-Alias resample takes more time than Stretch/Truncate but allows to smooth jagged edges in thumbnails.

Creating a Frame Around Thumbnail

The program contains various thumbnail frames to build a creative and stylish Web Album.

To make a frame around thumbnails

1. Select a frame from the Frame Effects list.
2. Click the Frame Color or Pattern button to change frame color or select different frame pattern. This option is not available for all frames.

Creating Links from Thumbnail Images to Original Images

The program makes links from thumbnail images to original images automatically but you need to specify an URL to folder on your web server where the original images have been uploaded.

Type the URL of folder where the original images are in the URL to Folder With Original Images box. Make this box blank if the original images are in the same folder on your web server as web album is.

Uploading Original Images to Web Site

The program can upload original images to your web site (if they are not on your web site yet).

To Upload Original Images to Web Site

1. Click to select the Upload Original Images to Web server check box.
2. Click the FTP Settings button.
3. The Publishing Settings dialog box appears.
4. Fill in the dialog box with parameters of your FTP account.
5. Click OK.

Creating web page with Web Album

1. Click the Finish button at the last step of the Web Album creation.
2. The program creates a new page with thumbnails of your images. Each of these thumbnails contains a Java Script with link to original image.

To modify Java Script code with link to original image

1. Select a thumbnail.
2. Click Link from the Modify menu.
3. Click the Additional Script button.
4. An HTML Script dialog box appears.
5. Modify the script and click Ok.

Exporting Web Album to HTML file

To have your Web Album viewable in Internet Browser, you need to generate an HTML file for the web album and create thumbnail images.

Uploading HTML File with Web Album and Thumbnails to Web Site

1. To make your Web Page to be visible from Internet, all files that the web album contains (HTML file and thumbnail files) must be transferred to your Web server.
2. Actual Drawing has feature to connect to your FTP server and upload all the page files to a folder on the FTP server.