Nov 22, 2008

A while ago, I wrote an article on how to put a Picasa slideshow into WordPress.  It helped some folks, so I’ll post more information here.

First of all, I should mention that while the original method still works, as of WP 2.6.2, the “normal” method of embedding Picasa slide shows into a web page seems to work just fine.  This involves getting the embed URL directly from Picasa and adding to the post.  A word to the wise though – you have to add the embed code in HTML mode in the editor.  If you do it in Visual mode, it doesn’t seem to work too well.  Oh well, its a small price to pay, and much easier than my original posted method.

For example if you copy this code from Picasa:

< embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf"
width="288" height="192" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com
&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2F
picasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi
%2Fuser%2Fmilowerx%2Falbumid
%2F5053811777489218721%3Fkind%3Dphoto
%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com
/go/getflashplayer">< / embed >

it becomes:

when it is in your post.  Nice!

Alternative Methods for a simple Slideshow

I’ve written a plugin to help folks with this task. Welcome Postcasa, a simple WordPress plugin to add the slideshow directly from the album RSS feed. Its easy to use and works regardless of if you are in visual or HTML mode.

Other Fancy Picasa Plugins

That said, there are many WordPress plugins that have been created that work well in their own right.  Most of them put album thumbnails directly into the post (instead of having one picture location that cycles through all the pictures).

Some of my favorite are:

• kPicasa Gallery – this great plugin is extremely simple to use and has a lot of configuration options.  The one downside to the plugin is (supposedly) that the gallery must be by itself on a page (i.e. it can’t be inline, meaning resident on a page with other information).  A second downside is that the plugin only supports one Picasa username for the entire blog.  You ARE able to specify which albums go on a page, etc. but they must all be from the same Picasa login.   Darn…
• KB Easy Picasa Web – this plugin is exactly as described.  Its easy.  All you have to do is put the hyperlink to an album in a post, and this plugin replaces the link with the album contents.  Very nice for certain situations.  The only problem is that it puts EVERYTHING in that one post, doesn’t paginate at all, and you can’t set the number of columns to use.  There are some formatting options, but they are fairly limited.  This is nice for someone who doesn’t need a lot of sophistication, and simply wants to “get to it” without having to add any shortcode to posts, etc.
• GoldenGate – this plugin doesn’t allow you to add an entire album at a time, but it DOES do something that is very unique.  It adds all of your Picasa photos to the MediaLibrary portion of the WordPress post editor in real time using Google APIs.  This is great for allowing you to store your photos on Picasa, but use them in posts in WordPress.  Very slick.
• Shashin – this is one of the members of the Picasa plugin Royal Family.  Its a great plugin and has a bit different behavior than many of the other plugins listed here.  It displays albums as well as the photos themselves as most do, but it also allows you zoom in on any picture using Highslide, which is free for non-commercial use.  The neat thing is that this zoom is in context of the page, not in a page covering popup viewer.
• altPWA – One of my favorites, this plugin allows using albums from multiple users and also has a bunch of settings to allow you to make the galleries look the way you want them to.  There is one challenge though – it uses the PHP function file_get_contents(), which isn’t allowed by many web hosts.  Since it is made available under GPL, I’ve modified the code to use CURL instead, which is allowed by most hosts.  I’ve sent mail to the original author offering the changed code to him so that his great plugin will be accessible to more people.  Its a very nice piece of work!  A few feature requests: 1) allow a page that displays a number of album roots (i.e. NOT the actual photos, but the actual listing of available albums) to also allow a column display rather than just one after the other and 2) add more CSS around the photo thumbnails so that they can be more easily stylized.  Minor, minor stuff, but desirable in my opinion nonetheless.

As you can see, if you are a Picasa / Google Fanboy like my brother, there are lots of options for integrating your favorite image manager with WordPress.  Life is good again.