Relative path... what is this?

When creating a CD-Rom album you will have to set the option Use relative path in the Picture Info dialog box (F6).

The reason for this option is that MyAlbum stores, in the album file, the absolute access path to your pictures so, later, it can load them and display them.

Example, my album (the .alb file) is stored in the folder:

In this folder I've created some sub-folders: Page1, Page2,à

The picture Picture1.jpg located in the Page1 folder will be listed in the album as:

The problem is that this album, copied to a CD-Rom, will continue to load my pictures from the hard drive of my computer. This will work fine on my PC but not at all on another PC where I wanted to play the CD on.

One solution would be to globally change the pictures access path (using the command Drive & Folder from the Edit menu) so the album will load the pictures from the CD.

Example, the picture Picture1.jpg will now be listed in the album:

This will work fine on my PC and on all PC where the CD drive is D:. But, depending on various parameters and hardware the CD drive may be identified as E: or F: or any other letter and the CD album will fail to load the pictures.

What I need is that MyAlbum use the current location of the album file for finding the pictures of the album. That's the purpose of the Use relative path option!

With this option activated, MyAlbum will use the album access path as a base path and look for the pictures from there.

Example, on the CD the album file is:

Its access path is: G:\AlbumTest\

The picture Picture1.jpg is still listed in the album in its original location, that is:

But in fact it is really in the folder:

MyAlbum compares the picture original access path and the album access path and finds a common part AlbumTest,

It will modify then the picture access path like this:

And voilα, MyAlbum can load and display the picture from the CD!!!

Caution, the relative path will not work if the two access paths are not related, i.e. the pictures must be stored in sub-folders of the folder the album file is stored in and the structure of this folder must be the same on the CD and on the hard drive.

For instance, I've put in my album a picture listed as:

Here, there is nothing in common between the access path of the album and the access path of the pictures, MyAlbum will not be able to locate and load the picture from the CD.