Photo album making software

Looking for some good software for making photo albums for my personal use. Seen some good programs in windows that generate flash albums.

As noted briefly on the Ubuntu forums, quite a good way of arranging a scrapbook or album of photos is by using Scribus, using one of the Python scripts from the Scribus wiki, and then exporting the album as a pdf.

So, first run

sudo apt-get install scribus

Then go the Scribus wiki page and save, for example, the first script to file and make it executable. Now load up Scribus, and from within the program go to Script > Execute Script > choose location of script. Then via the script dialogue you can choose the number of images to be displayed on a page, and select the folder of images to be used. (You can either pre-prepare a special folder with the images you want or just choose any folder with images.) The Scribus document will include them all, however many there are, although it will take longer to create if there are a lot of images.

Once your document is created you can add titles and captions, and export it as a pdf so that it can be shared. It is of course possible to modify the Python scripts and create one that suits your particular needs. The scripts may of course need to be updated when new versions of Scribus come out.

I have found this is a good way of creating a personalised album without recourse to java or flash based programs.

The screenshot below shows the pictures imported in Scribus, but before the captions and any title page are added. You don't need to worry about this becoming a complex desktop publishing project, as it is very easy and fast to create your own albums.

I love Google's "Picasa". A great program for managing pictures. You can also create movies, slideshows or upload photos to "Picasa Web Albums".

You can download the .deb from http://picasa.google.lt/linux/

Download the .deb file wherever you like, such as to your Downloads folder.

Then, one way to install it is to double-click on it--the Software Center or GDebi will open, prompt you for your password, and all you to install.

Another way to install it, after downloading it, is to open the Terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T, type sudo dpkg -i (including the space at the end), then drag the .deb file from the graphical file browser into the Terminal and press Enter in the Terminal. This will run the necessary command to install it in the Terminal.

However you install Picasa, you can run it by searching for it in the Unity Dash and clicking on it in the search results.