Web Gallery Transition

An example of my previous web gallery look (left) vs. the new look with jAlbum (right)

Finally, just about a week ago with the latest update to Adobe Lightroom (v.15.5.1), the TTG Highslide export module that I had bought, extensively customized and had been using for the last 16 years, has stopped working properly. Exporting a gallery gave messed up formatting and visible XML code scattered all over every page, so finally it became totally unusable. I can’t really complain too much, since I did manage to eke out 16 years of use from that plugin!

Interestingly enough, a few weeks prior to the Lightroom update, I had already started hunting for alternative web gallery software since I had a feeling I might need something in the near future. Since I no longer wanted to be at the mercy of Lightroom updates, I tried a number of different stand-alone web gallery export programs and emailed a few companies for details when they didn’t have free demo versions. Unfortunately none gave me the flexibility and features I was looking for either, and no company I contacted even bothered to reply back to my questions. With some more research and more specific Googling, I finally came across jAlbum (https://jalbum.net) the other day. After some promising tests with the free, feature limited version and seeing some sample galleries online that seemed to do most of what I wanted, I decided to give it a go and bought the mid-tier package.

2026: Ottawa Fireworks Finale

 Gallery (40 images): 2026 Ottawa Fireworks Finale

On August 15th, Emily and I went to see the Les Grands Feux du Casino Lac-Leamy fireworks festival finale at Kiweki Point Park in Ottawa. We only managed to get there about an hour before the fireworks started, so there were no more spots with an unobstructed view. Any spots with a direct view of the Ottawa River and the fireworks barge were taken, so after scoping out a few early teaser bursts (which Emily also helped me with since she knew the area better), I decided on a spot with some foreground trees and no crowds of people right in front of the camera. The vast majority of the fireworks were plenty high enough to see from that vantage point, and it made for a different framing than my usual. As the show progressed, the fireworks got progressively higher, so I adjusted the camera up a bit, shooting with my widest lens that I had with me. Due to the height and spread, I also decided to crop all the fireworks shots to a 5:4 aspect ratio, instead of the native 3:2 of my camera.

2026 Ottawa Summer Walks

 Gallery (20 images): 2026 Ottawa Summer Walks

Update [2026/08/25]: The linked gallery above is using a new experimental layout, made with jAlbum. With the latest update of Adobe Lightroom, I can no longer use my heavily customized gallery plugin that I'd been using for a long time. I will still be tweaking the design, but so far I am liking what I see. Maps are now supplied by OpenStreetMap and can be seen by clicking the "Map" link at the bottom of the larger image view. On the thumbnail page, there is also a larger map showing pins with locations for each photo in the gallery. Google is no longer being used. Exif data is more detailed and can be accessed by clicking the "Photo data" button beside the map button. You can now double-click the larger image to zoom into the full 3000 pixel wide version and then pan it around. A second double-click fits the image back to the window.

The linked gallery contains photos of a few excursions Emily and I went on in late July and early August. These include a hike to Meech Lake in Gatineau Park, two photos from the patio overlooking some falls on the Mississippi river (not related to the river in the US) at a fantastic Italian restaurant in the small town of Almonte, then a bunch more while hiking around the historic Mackenzie King Estate in Gatineau Park, which include some faux abbey ruins (seen in the headline image above) that Mackenzie King had constructed as a relaxing place to meditate. The components of the ruins were taken from a variety of places, including the former Parliament building that were destroyed by fire in 1916, Mackenzie King’s grandfather’s printing shop, and even pieces of buildings of the British Parliament.

2024 Southwest Trip - Days 5 & 6 - Death Valley

Gallery (25 images): 2024 Southwest Trip - Days 5 & 6 - Death Valley

This gallery covers a few days in and around Death Valley. Driving through the Panamint Valley, we were struck by the immense carpet of yellow wildflowers in the valley. We then visited a variety of locations, including Badwater, the lowest point in the US at -282 feet below sea-level, Zabriskie Point and the Artists Palette, which takes one along large multi-coloured sandstone sections of the hills that one drives by. Sadly, the sky was a bit hazy to the west and only got worse as the evening progressed, so we did not stay for late evening/sunset light there. Lastly, we camped near the Inyo Mine ruins, and we spent some time at the ruins after dark with lovely clear skies, doing some night sky photography and light painting.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 3 - Alcatraz

Gallery (60 images): 2024 Southwest Trip - Day 3 - Alcatraz

This gallery is still from day three, after our walk through the city and Chinatown, but during an evening tour of Alcatraz Island (managed by the US National Park Service), and inside the well kept ruins of the infamous maximum security federal prison known as "The Rock."

I absolutely love photographing old decaying buildings, and the old prison gave many wonderful opportunities for photos with colours, textures, dramatic light & shadow as well as impactful subject matter. I shot everything handheld and the in-body image-stabilization (IBIS) of the Fujifilm X-T5 I was using was indispensable in getting sharp photos with my wide-angle prime lenses without taking the ISO up to crazy high levels. The success of these photos was instrumental in finally giving me the nudge to upgrade my X-Pro2, which did not have IBIS, and buy the X-E5 which came out in 2025 and more or less has the same image quality, IBIS and performance of the X-T5, but in a far more compact rangefinder style body. I would not have been able to get photos with the dynamic range and needed depth-of-field had I been using the X-Pro2 handheld; I definitely would have needed a tripod, and tripods are not allowed on tours there...

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

Hawaii 2023 - Botanical Gardens

Gallery (50 images): Hawaii 2023 - Botanical Gardens

Somehow, I had thought that I'd already posted all of my 2023 Hawaii galleries, however I realized I had one more day to do, so...

On the second-to-last day of our Hawaii trip and honeymoon, we decided to visit the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Gardens just north of Hilo. The variety of plant life in the lush jungle was amazing! We wandered around for several hours, marvelling at all the exotic plants and took lots of photos.

Finally, on the last day of our honeymoon, we went to an acclaimed and recommended tattoo artist in Hilo and Emily and I both got a matching Polynesian/Hawaiian sea turtle tattoo on opposite shoulders. Emily had numerous tattoos already, but it was my first. Why? Well on the first morning of our honeymoon in Kona, Emily and I went out to the rocky beach right in front of our room and saw a large sea turtle feeding in the water, close enough to touch. We watched it for maybe 10 minutes. It didn’t seem bothered by our proximity at all and we both were touched by the experience. In Hawaiian mythology, the sea turtle stands for good health, longevity, peace and tranquility, amongst other positive attributes, so we thought it a fitting symbol and a wonderful reminder of our wedding and Hawaiian honeymoon! We both felt that the tattoo artist did a wonderful job and it was interesting hearing him describe the various components of his design and their meaning...

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 3

Gallery (30 images): 2024 Southwest Trip - Day 3

This gallery has images from our walk through San Francisco's Chinatown and down to the Powell Street Cable Car Station just east of the Tenderloin district. We rode one of the famous, historic San Francisco cable cars (wikipedia link) all the way back to near Fisherman's Wharf, Hyde Street Station, so the Powell-Hyde route.

The cable cars are rotated by hand on a large turntable by two or three burly people, to change direction at the ends of their route. I have some videos of our trip on the cable car, which I will upload and link to in the future. Sadly it started raining during the cable car ride, with dimmed daylight and wet droplet covered windows, so I did not bother to take any photos. I only shot video during the ride.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

2026 - Dow's Lake Tulip Festival

 Gallery (20 images): 2026 - Dow's Lake Tulip Festival

On a sunny and warm spring weekend, Emily and I visited Dow's Lake in Ottawa for the annual Tulip Festival. It was very busy, but somehow I expected even more crowds than there were. It really didn't take long to get close to each flower bed and take photos of the tulips. There were many vendors set up as well and there was a Dutch pop-up store that sold lovely painted wooden tulips too, seen in the last photo in the gallery.

2026 - Montréal in April

Gallery (40 images): 2026 - Montréal in April

In late April, Emily and I were off to Montréal for her to attend a conference. That gave me the opportunity to wander around the city during a warm spring afternoon taking some photos in and around Old Montréal. I visited the Notre-Dame Basilica but sadly, parts of it were covered in tarps and scaffolding. It was also closed to visitors except on a guided tour. I went to the Port of Montréal docks on the St. Lawrence River and photographed the sights there, including an interesting glass viewing tower (not yet open for the season) as well as catching some views of Habitat 67 (see photo 27), a housing complex seemingly made up of random stacked cubes, built during Montréal's Expo 67 world's fair. I will have to make a point of checking it out in the future, since I suspect it will look far more interesting up close.

2024 Southwest Trip - Days 1 & 2

Gallery (55 images): 2024 Southwest Trip - Days 1 & 2

This gallery has images from the first two days of photography during my first Southwestern US trip with my wife Emily in April of 2024. There are some days where I took no photos due to lots of driving, so in this case day 2 is not the next day, but the day after next. I published a "trip highlights" blog post in May of 2024 which details the route we took, and that can be seen here...

http://www.mikemander.com/2024/05/2024-southwest-trip-highlights.html

On this trip, Fujifilm Canada was kind enough to lend me a demo X-T5 body, so my X-Pro2 acted as a backup on the trip. It was fantastic having a camera with in-body image-stabilization (IBIS) especially for our tour of Alcatraz (next blog post!), and also having a 40 megapixel sensor for landscape detail was great as well. As of August of 2025, I now have my own 40MP, IBIS equipped Fujifilm camera, the very compact X-E5, which is a fantastic camera too. So after two years, I am now finally starting to post some daily trip galleries (like this one) with more detail about all the places we visited. Since Emily and I no longer live in BC (we moved to Ottawa, Ontario as I'm sure you've noticed, based on my recent blog posts), we are unfortunately no longer able to do any easy Southwest road trips. Working on images from previous trips will then be my way of experiencing and reliving the wonderful deserts of California, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, as well as the high deserts of Oregon, all of which I greatly miss already!

On this 2024 road trip, Emily and I drove through Washington and Oregon, basically non-stop, and the first place we took some time to explore was Stout Grove in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, situated in northern California. We didn't have as much time as we had hoped, which was my fault: I accidentally forgot to pack Emily's sun hat and we decided to detour to an REI for some shopping in southern Oregon. The detour and time spent at the REI was longer that we had anticipated, and since we had booked a hotel in San Francisco with the plan of staying there for three days, we only had limited time on the drive south. The second part of the gallery has shots from San Francisco...

On our first day there, we walked from our hotel near Chinatown to the very scenic Fisherman's Wharf area, and spent the day sightseeing, visiting a few places of interest. Photos 18 to 20 show the large number of sea lions that frequent the harbour, sunning themselves on the docks. We went up on a huge Ferris wheel with enclosed cabins (thankfully since there was a very cold wind that day) and photos 29 to 32 were from up high, although the city views are a touch blurry due to being shot through less than clean glass. Photo 28 shows the ferris wheel in the distance. Next was a weird and wonderful museum of antique mechanical "arcade" machines, The Musée Mécanique, shown in photos 35 through 43 in the gallery. We also walked to the famous Ghirardelli chocolate factory, photos 47 to 51, which was founded way back in 1852.

The last photo in the gallery shows the famous steep stretch of Lombard Street from below, said to be one of the crookedest streets in America with eight tight hairpin turns in only one block! You can see all the cars backed up and descending down the hill.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip