After spending a fair amount of time getting the family photos arranged for publication, I believe I have discovered that Gallery will not handle bmp files. Bummer.

Why bmps? Well, everything I scan, I prefer to store that way, rather than in jpg or png. Not a big deal, I suppose, and it takes more filespace, but that’s the path I chose.

I really want to use JAlbum. It’s been a faithful companion in my publishing endeavors, but it won’t handle bmp files either. It looks like the author is thinking about enhancing it to handle other file formats — including bmps — but that’s a ways off.

So, I am left with a few paths.

I could convert all bmps to jpgs. This takes time (not a huge amount), uses extra filespace (not a huge amount either).

I could work on my skin for JAlbum, and have it do something when it encounters a bmp file. That something could be convert to jpg (temporarily — probably using ImageMagick), and let JAlbum process the newly created jpg.

And, once I get the bmps handled, I still have functionality missing with JAlbum that exists in Gallery, and that is user feedback on photos. For the family photos section, I really want to have the facility for folks to tell me who people in photos are, and preserve some of their memories along the way.

JAlbum doesn’t have this. Gallery does. Neither support bmps from what I can tell.

I keep hearing about Coppermine…. I guess that’s the next one to check into. I really don’t wanna write a lot of code to bend something to my needs, or create something from scratch. At this point, I just wanna be an appliance operator and get the data out there.