Installing Album

See FAQ / Troubleshooting in case you run into issues. Please also file an issue if you experience unwanted behaviour.

What gets installed? Album uses a two-context execution model: a host Album environment (created during installation, contains the controller and CLI) and a separate per-solution micromamba environment that is created later, the first time you album install each solution. Album manages micromamba itself — you do not need a system-wide conda or micromamba installation. The wizard is a self-contained executable that creates ~/.album and downloads micromamba into it on first launch.

Automated installation with Album installation wizard:

You can install Album by simply downloading the installation wizard for your operating system and executing it.

Supported Platforms

Platform

Architecture

Install Wizard

Linux x86_64

linux-64

✅

Linux ARM64

linux-aarch64

—

Linux POWER

linux-ppc64le

—

macOS x86_64

osx-64

✅

macOS ARM64 (Apple Silicon)

osx-arm64

✅

Windows x86_64

win-64

✅

Note: Platforms without an install wizard (Linux ARM64, Linux POWER) are fully supported at runtime — Album will automatically download the correct Micromamba binary for your platform. Use the manual installation instructions on those platforms.

The installation wizards will create a new directory called .album inside your home directory. Into this directory the installer installs Micromamba and creates the Album environment for you. On your Desktop you will find a link called Album which will start the Album graphical user interface.

On some Windows systems, especially virtual machines, the installer will trigger a request for admin rights. This is because the installer of micromamba needs to edit the powershell profile. The installer will only edit the profile of the current user and not the system profile. The installer will not install anything on your system without your permission. If you deny the request for admin rights the installer will install album in a GUI only mode. This means that you can only use Album in the graphical user interface and not in the commandline/powershell since they cannot be initialised without admin rights.

On MacOS, double clicking the executable might state that Apple can’t check the app for malicious software. You need to open the context menu from Finder, choose Open from there and confirm that you want to run this application.

On Linux, the downloaded file needs to be made executable by running chmod +x ./album_installer.

Manually activating the environment for commandline usage

To activate the Album environment for commandline use one of the following commands:

micromamba activate -p ~/.album/envs/album

Uninstallation

To uninstall everything, simply delete the .album directory in your home directory.

Manual Installation

Installation using pip

Album is also available on PyPI:

pip install album

Note: Album requires git as a system dependency (used for catalog management). pip cannot install system packages, so you must ensure git is available on your system separately. The micromamba/conda-forge installation handles this automatically.