Picasa Album Template Finished
Picasa turns out to be a quality application, with a nice interface. I really enjoy the ability to export albums for web publishing as generated HTML or as XML, although it is disappointing that you have no control over the drop shadows added to the thumbnail images.
Using the XML-export feature, I created a WordPress template that finds the album XML file that matches the post slug, parses the XML file for the list of images and thumbnails, displays the selected image, and generates a navigational list of thumbnails. This allows me to show a Picasa album fully integrated into my site. I can secure private/family albums using the built-in WordPress password protection. I can enable WordPress-managed comments and pings. The template reuses CSS and PHP code shared with other templates. Albums can appear anywhere within the static page heirarchy, rather than being confined to a separate web site section. Using the Picasa template involves just three steps:
- Write the page in WordPress, choosing a meaningful page/post slug and selecting my Picasa template
- Export the album as XML, using the page slug as the name of the album
- Upload the exported folder to my site
Check out Galaxy Sleuth 3D, my first Picasa album.
Since I update and tweak my site and templates constantly, contact me if you would like the source code for this template.
August 22nd, 2005 at 7:47 pm
picasa rules. i hate to admit but i think i liked it better than iphoto. On the mac, I had to write a script to parse iphoto directory exports and build the xml to mimic picasa’s format to drop onto my site.