A library is a collection of related albums, such as albums of photos from the same vacation, or albums of photos from a season's motorcycle races. How many albums you collect into a library and how they're related is entirely up to you. You get two benefits from creating a library:
Each album in the library can contain links to the other albums in the library, to allow easy navigation from album to album.
Since one of the albums can in effect be a directory page for the entire library, it's easy to provide a single URL that let's users get to all the albums in the library. Without the library feature, you would have to construct such a directory page manually and then keep it updated whenever you added an album or changed an album title. With libraries, all that can be automated.
For an example of a library, click here. As you examine this example, note the each album contains links to the other albums, as does the directory page. In fact, the directory page is an album, too.
To create a library, first create some or all of the albums to go in it. Then, choose the File|New|Library menu command to bring up the Select Albums dialog. Select the albums you want and click OK. You then go to the New Library dialog where you can name the library and choose whether you want each album to contain links to the other albums in the library. This is also where you can rearrange the order of links and publish the whole library to your Web site if you want.
To manage an existing library, choose File|Open|Library to get to the Manage Library dialog, which is identical to the New Library dialog except that some fields that you can't change (e.g., the library name) are disabled.
A library can include only albums whose directories are immediate subdirectories of the library directory (the directory containing the library file whose suffix is "alg".)
It's easier to explain the above rule with a picture:
In this picture, the squares are files: A, B, C, and D are albums; L1 and L2 are libraries. The circles are directories. Directory A is the album directory for album A, etc.
Library L1 can contain albums A and B; it can't contain C or D. Similarly, library L2 can contain albums C and D. Library L3 can't contain any albums shown in the picture, although if an album directory were placed in directory Z, then L3 could contain that album.
You don't really have to worry about following these restrictions when you create and modify a library, as Albumatic enforces them for you by allowing you to add only albums that are in the correct directories. You just need to make sure that all the albums that are to go into the same library have the same parent directory. When you create the library, place it in that parent.
The easiest way to create albums that have a common parent is first create the first album and then to use the Clone button in the Album Properties dialog to create the other albums.
For the links among the various albums in a library to work, they have to be kept up to date as albums are added or removed from the library or as album titles change. Here's what Albumatic does automatically and what you have to do yourself:
When you build an individual album (e.g., Build Page button), its links are automatically brought up to date by accessing the current library and the titles of all the library's albums.