JAlbum

At the request of my biggest fans, I’ve been trying to get the photo albums up to date again. The challenge with that has been that JAlbum has not supported RAW images, and that’s all I’ve been shooting lately.

Enter jrawio.

This little goodie knows how to read RAW images, and extend ’em to JAlbum and any other java code. That’s cool, and the missing link and rosetta stone all in one for me. All that’s needed is to add this to the classpath for JAlbum when it runs.

Yeah…….

The most common recommendation for making that change is in the JAlbum.lax file. Well, for a Mac, the JAlbum.lax file doesn’t exist. In Apple-land, the key file is Info.plist, and it lives in /Applications/JAlbum/JAlbum.app/Contents. Before changing it, make a copy!

In here, you’ll find the -Xms and -Xmx parms (which I have now doctored to suit me, 1024M to start, and 1536M as a max), along with the classpath. This is all XML, so it’s pretty clear what to change. So, with my classpath set, and my memory set higher, I tried to see if JAlbum would pull the new jar file into the fold.

It seems to be working pretty well, but it beats the hell out of the Quad G5 for the first few minutes before finally getting moving. And, for the first time since I’ve had the Quad, I heard the jet fans begin stir while doing processing, and I watched the system utilization go to 100% on all the processors. For 170 RAW images, it took about 10 minutes to churn through ’em all which isn’t obscene.

However, the generated images were dark… very dark.  So much so that I couldn’t but barely make out anything in the images.  Ugh……

Back to the drawing board, I guess.