An album you create with Albumatic always goes in a directory whose name is the same as the album name, with the possible substitution of underscores for punctuation characters. For example, if you create an album named "BirthdayParty", Albumatic will put all the files for that album into a directory whose name is "BirthdayParty". Once you create the album, you can't change its name.
If you want several album directories to all go into the same directory tree, use the Subdir field in the Album Properties dialog. Albumatic will create the path you type there automatically.
For example, if you've typed "Family\Jimmy" in the Subdir field and "BirthdayParty" in the album name field, the path to the album directory will be "Family\Jimmy\BirthdayParty".
Where does Albumatic create the subdirectory "Family?" There's one answer for your PC, the Local Directory Root, and a different answer for your Web site, the Remote Directory Root. These are explained in the next two sections.
On your PC, Albumatic creates album directories as subdirectories of a root directory that you specify using the Application Preferences dialog. By default, this is a subdirectory or the Albumatic program directory named "Albums". On your computer, it might be something like "C:\Program Files\Basepath Software\Albumatic\Albums". You'll often want to make it something easier to get to, such as "C:\Albums".
Here's an example: If you've set the Local Directory Root to be "C:\Albums" and the album properties are set as illustrated in the previous section, the complete path to the album directory on your PC would be "C:\Albums\Family\Jimmy\BirthdayParty", and the complete path to the album itself would be "C:\Albums\Family\Jimmy\BirthdayParty\BirthdayParty.alb".
If you change the Local Directory Root, it will affect only new albums that you subsequently create. Albums that already exist will stay where they are.
With the FTP Server Subdirectory field in the FTP Connection dialog, you can set a subdirectory for your album on a Web site. This path is analogous to the Local Directory Root, in that it is prepended to the album directory path to determine where the album goes on the server. That is, the album directory path is common to the local and remote sites, whereas the Local Directory Root and Remote Directory Root are usually different. This is illustrated by the following diagram:
The Remote Directory Root specifies where the album directory tree goes on the server, but there's still the question of what URL you use to view the album. Part of the URL--the album directory paty--is known, but the part to its left is sometimes hard to figure out. Knowing that the FTP server is, say, "ftp.geocities.com" and that the Remote Directory Root is, say, "www/FamilyPhotos" doesn't lead to any simple conclusion about what the URL is. In fact, the URL would be:
http://www.geocities.com/mrochkind/VacPhotos/Family/Jimmy/BirthdayParty
Looking at the URL, it makes some sense: The three directories on the right are the album directory path, the Remote Directory Root preceeds them, and the part to the left is the URL of the mail GeoCities web site. But the FTP User ID ("mrochkind") has been inserted into the middle.
This method of forming the URL is just for GeoCities. Generally, each Web site has a different way of doing it, and there's no obvious relationship between the various pieces of FTP data (server name, user ID, etc.) and the final URL.
To help, Albumatic tries to guess the URL after publishing the album, and it's usually able to do so. It displays the URLs that worked (often more than one) in the preview window. If the guessing features seems to be turned off, you can re-enable it from the Application Preferences dialog.
One added wrinkle to the explanation of album directories above is that you can collect albums that have a common parent directory into a library, so that each album contains links to the other albums in the library. (See About Libraries for more details about libraries.)
A library directory isn't a new directory, but just a way of thinking about the parent directory of two or more albums. For example, given the album directories "C:\Albums\Family\Jimmy\BirthdayParty" and "C:\Albums\Family\Jimmy\Camp", the two albums BirthdayParty and Camp could go into a library of albums of Jimmy's photos, and its library directory would be "C:\Albums\Family\Jimmy".
A library directory must be excatly the level above (the parent) the albums in contains.
Here's a summary of the various directories and how to use them:
1. Use the Subdir field in the Album Properties dialog to organize your albums into a tree on your PC. Whatever structure you use will be reproduced on the Web site and will appear in the URLs that reference the albums.
2. Use the Local Directory Root in the Application Preferences dialog to specify where the album tree goes on your PC.
3. Use the FTP Server Subdirectory (Remote Directory Root) to specify where the album tree goes on the server. some parts of the subdirectory may be required by the site you're using.
4. Use libraries to collect related albums so that Albumatic will automatically link them together.
5. Once you've published an album, let Albumatic guess the URL.