The Album palette should look familiar because it displays the selections you made in the Project Setup Wizard. Generally speaking you can add to or edit these at any time. You must have made selections against all fields before you can send orders to your album supplier.

The album palette has four panes (Vendor, Cover, Pages and Titles). On these panes you enter the data Photojunction needs to fully describe your album to the supplier. At this stage you’ll be editing the choices you made using the Setup Wizard, but because we skipped over the details when we described the Setup Wizard, we'll discuss them more fully now.

By the way, you can use Photojunction for album planning even if the Album resources you’re using don’t include details of all these features. If there’s no data in the current Resources about a specific feature, the feature just won’t be accessible.

Depending on how much use the supplier has made of Photojunction's features, you may see a button to view additional notes on screen or a link to more vendor information online. You may also see illustrative images. If so, click on the image to view it full size.

The vendor pane 

On the Vendor pane, shown in the graphic at the top of this page, you’ll see the album supplier you selected in the Product Setup Wizard. You cannot change the Supplier but you can change the product reference and comments.

The cover pane 

There are three pop-ups (selection lists) on the Cover pane: Album Format, Cover Material and Cover Style.

• Selecting an album format is mandatory. This establishes the dimensions and type ("matted" or "digital") of your album, and also allows the maker to  set other rules and functionalities, such as the maximum number and type of pages, services offered etc.

• If data has been entered by the supplier you can specify the cover material for your album. This may be represented in the program by an image swatch or an RGB colour value, which will be used by Photojunction to represent the cover in the Album Layout window and Preview palette. If the data is missing, Photojunction displays the album cover as a neutral grey.

• If data has been entered by the supplier you can specify a decorative cover style for your album. If the style you’ve chosen requires text (names and date for example) you’ll need to enter the text before you can send the order. If the style you’ve chosen requires a cover image, you can design the layout on the Album Layout window.  If there is no data, the cover will be displayed plain (without decoration) and you won’t be able to edit it.

The Pages pane

There are three pop-ups (selection lists) on the Pages pane. Which ones are active depends on whether the Album Format you chose is matted or digital (un-matted).

• If your album is matted you need to choose a mat colour and page type (both are mandatory). Your choices will depend on the supplier, of course. As with cover materials, mat colours may be represented by an RGB colour value or an image.

• Again assuming you're designing a matted album, your page type selection will determine the “aperture type” for this album: overlay (the default), pagemount, bevel-edge or double-matted. Your supplier almost certainly doesn't offer all options, and may use different terminology. Click the graphic above for a description of the four aperture types. As with Album Format, choosing a Page Type allows the maker to  set other rules, such as whether you can mix aperture types in the one album. Click here for more about images and apertures.

• If you've chosen a digital (ie un-matted) album format you can set the default background colour at the bottom of the Pages pane. You can change this colour layout by layout if you wish.

The Titles pane

If your album supplier offers personalised Titles, you can make a selection from the Titles pane. You'll then be able to enter the necessary details for the style you've selected (eg names, dates etc).

A warning about changing album format and/or page type 

You can’t change album vendor but you can change Album Format and/or Page Type. These are fundamental changes, and can be very useful – but should be undertaken with great caution. For example unless the aspect ratio of your page is exactly the same, you will lose all formatting. The apertures will remain on the page but you'll need to redesign the layouts.

WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU DUPLICATE YOUR ALBUM BEFORE YOU CHANGE EITHER THE ALBUM FORMAT OR THE PAGE TYPE.

You can duplicate the album in the Propject Browser by right-clicking on it or clicking on the appropriate Duplicate icon at the bottom of the screen.