As I use JAlbum to generate web albums, I need to install it onto my Linux machine. To do so I had to upgrade my Java Virtual Machine to Sun’s latest version. I decided to use the Synaptic Package Manager for this, as I was not entirely sure which packages I needed to install. With a quick search on Synaptic I quickly found the latest Sun Java files and installed them. After this Jalbum installed perfectly.
My next task was to upload photos from my Canon EOS 20d camera to Ubuntu. The Canon software that comes with the camera does a fine job on Windows, but this was no use to me. First of all, Ubuntu did not recognise my Camera at all. A quick search revealed that I needed to change the camera’s communication setting from normal to PTP. I had never even heard of PTP before today. It stands for Picture Transfer Protocol (seems obvious now). According to Wikipedia Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) is a widely supported protocol developed by the International Imaging Industry Association to allow the transfer of images from digital cameras to computers and other peripheral devices without the need of additional device drivers. Perfect for me, as this means no drivers are required, so the Canon CD can be put aside for good!
To actually upload the photos I have used gThumb (an image viewer and browser for GNOME), which appears to have some rudimentary editing tools too, and an album generator of sorts too. Really I need to look into it further.
So now I can upload my photos from my digital camera onto my Linux machine, and then generate albums using JAlbum, which runs on Java.