Search what's in the album
Let your album visitors search through your photos without the need of databases or server side scripting technologies!Just choose which info should be searchable (title, name, comment, keywords, exif, info+ etc.), generate the album, upload it and you're done :-)
Once uploaded, you may use links to point to specific search results. For example, if you have added new photos from your last trip to France and want to invite your friends to see them, then just add "?q=france" to the album link you're sending to your friends. That allows you to create photo collections just by adding the search term(s) which matches your collection! Here is an example, collecting photos of "France".
Adding keywords
You can tag your photos with keywords to make them better searchable. In the example you see that I've tagged the photo with different keywords, e.g. "France".
You may also tag folders, so all photos in or below this folder become searchable by these folder keywords.
Since jAlbum version 10, jAlbum supports also keywords on its own. This is good news because you can use them with any skin which supports them. LightFlow supports jAlbum's keywords since version 3.8.3.
jAlbum's keywords are entered here:
Besides keywords, which are not displayed in the album, you can furthermore indicate other searchable sources (title, name, comment, exif, info+ etc.). Don't forget to activate the search feature in LightFlow's GUI and select all desired searchable sources:
Once activated, the album shows a little clickable magnifier icon. The album visitor may enter multiple words to refine the search, since all search terms must match:
The search performance is remarkably good: it's still fast for multiple thousands of photos. For huge photo libraries of multiple ten thousands of photos I recommend you a server side solution though.
LightFlow's GUI allows you to choose the maximum number of matches to show (see screenshot above). The lesser the number, the faster the result page shows up.
Hint for Chrome users: Chrome browsers may throw an error while searching when the album is locally previewed. So, either upload the album to a webserver or start Chrome with the --allow-file-access-from-files switch. See here for more details.