Oct 21, 2007
How to put Picasa Slideshows in WordPress
UPDATE!
There is now a “better” way to embed Picasa slideshows in your WordPress posts.
- A direct embed now works with WP (as of v2.6.2 AFIK). Check out this new post for some additional info.
- The easiest way, IMO, is to use my new plugin, Postcasa. All you have to do is put the Picasa RSS link between this simple shortcode, and the plugin does the rest.
- Plug-in hasn’t been updated in several WP versions
- Plug-in didn’t work properly with the latest version of Flash
- RSS based plug-ins couldn’t actually download the feed because:
- Security didn’t allow getting the feed and storing it locally
- The feed had changed since the plug-in was released and it made the parser barf
- It required activating PHP code in each post, which is a security nightmare, IMHO
Example:
[postcasa]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]
easily becomes:
Original Post
My brother wanted to put a Picasa slide show in his blog. He can’t help it – he’s a big Google Fanboy. 
Anyway, after searching around and trying at least 8 different plug-ins to try and get this to work I finally came upon the correct secret mixture to make it work.
Some of the plug-ins that didn’t work had these problems:
Well, for those of you who have been banging your head on your keyboard trying to get this working, here is the key:
1. Run over and download Kimili, a great embedded flash plug-in. Kudos to Michael Bester for excellent piece of work. There are others like it, but this one is full featured and seems more stable than others that I’ve tried. Upload and activate the plug-in.
2. Use the new Picasa embedded slide-show tool to generate the embedding code – for example:
<embed> type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0×000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F
milowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3D
photo%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY" src="http://picasaweb.google.com
/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" mce_src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="267" width="400"> <embed>
3. Now for the “kinda” tricky part… You need to translate that code into code for Kimili. Fortunately, it really isn’t that hard. Kimili uses the syntax:
[ kml_flashembed movie="filename.swf" height="250" width="400" / ]
and uses fvars to pass parameters to the embedded flash video. The Picasa code uses the slideshow.swf file as the “movie” and everything that is in flashvars should be put into fvars. Make sure that you leave out the type parameter but include the height, width and pluginspage.
4. The final translated code should look like this:
[ kml_flashembed movie="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" height="267" width="400" fvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0×000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F
milowerx%2Falbumid%2F5123888780136287569%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt
%3Drss%26authkey%3D5M3WrH3fEkY"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"/ ]
You can see the results of all this hard work here.
You rock lil’ bro! Totally rock!
Thank you! The Picasa slideshow was added to the post on the first try.
Also, we have to use custom fields to add jpg photos to the post excerpts on the front page. It was cool to see that that slideshow showed up in our front page automatically.
Thank you again and a Happy New Year!
Glad it helped! Thanks for the nice comment and the info!
I like the idea of this and I want it… but after looking thru the post… it’ looks like overload for average dudes?
Jeff
Hey Jeff,
Actually, it is much more simple that it appears at first. Setting up Kimili is simple, and extracting the information from the Picasa thing is easy once you get the hang of what to look for.
I’d be more than glad to help if you have questions. Feel free to comment, or drop me a line: miloa at miloco.com
Thanks for stopping by!
Cheers,
A
[...] Thanks to Andy’s Blog for the tips on how to embed a Picasa Slideshow in WordPress [...]
Thanks for this. Worked like a charm.
My pleasure! Glad it could help… Thanks for dropping a note!
Cheers,
A
nice post.but it is not for those who have web based wordpress.I am wordpress.com register user.so cant use this method.but thanks anyway.good post.
this is very cool and so simple to implement. thanks for posting!
My pleasure! Glad it worked for you…
Hello Andrew. Just to let you know that the code you gave here still works in WP 2.7 beta3-9841. Thanks.
Only hitch with Kimili plugin 1.42 and 1.43 is that it’s been breaking WP Visual Editor since 2.6 so I’ve taught the guys to post in HTML mode
P.S. your codes in #3 and #4 above are not showing up, FYI. Fortunately I’ve saved those precious codes long time ago.
Thanks Maria! I fixed the code so that it shows up – apparently something in WP 2.6.2 grabs the shortcode designation, even though there isn’t a handler for it on my site.
Also, I’ve made an update post to this info. The inner workings of WP now seem to allow a direct imbed without having to use Kimli!
Check out:
http://blog.miloco.com/2008/11/more-picasa-goodness.html
for some additional information!
Thanks for the heads-up!
Cheers,
A
Hello Andrew. Will check out your plugin definitely in WP and WPMU. Direct embed still not good for WPMU installations even in latest version. However, the men using the single WP are really enjoying getting their slideshows “excerpted” into the front page like the one you did with Kimili – amazing
Btw, Kimili now playing well with WP2.7 visual editor. Thanks again.
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