Picasa and WordPress
In the process of working up a couple of new blogs and going through some the plugins that I have on the old faithful blogs and decided what works and what needs to be replaced. NextGen Gallery is a really nice tool that I have used on my blogs, it would seem from the beginning and if not nearly so. It is a way overpowered tool for the options and limited galleries that I actually use it for, but it has served the purpose well all the same and without fail. The only issue I have is more of a recent one, where I have, as of last year started organizing all my pictures into web-based albums using Picasa as the engine. There are several reasons why I chose Picasa, some of which are listed below. The problem is with both Picasa and NextGen, for those pictures headed to a blog I now have to do double duty working them up.
Why choose Picasa for my web and even home based photo organization, storage, and manipulation tool? Several factors weigh in on this, but when I was looking at options I wanted something that would give me the ability of both local storage and cloud/web storage for backup and ease of use on the web by other third-party tools. There were a couple that did that, but several either limited the number of active pictures that were available on the web or greatly reduced the resolution/color depth after a set time. As I wanted this for backup, I was more than okay to pay for the ability to keep the photos in the original format if I went over the free limit but most, outside of Picasa did not really have that as an option. Those few that did were web-based storage/manipulation only, so Picasa was my first choice for this application.
Some folks may suggest that I just create a blog and put all my pictures on my own self hosted website and continue to use NextGen for all my storage needs. Of course two or three problems exist with this. Number one, I can get free bandwidth for the pictures from Picasa that would otherwise count in my total using a self hosting situation. The same would also be true for total space, up to point, though the space I am allowed on self hosting make it where I would quickly reach free limit on Picasa first. But even that additional space is very generous and cheap in the next step up and would, based on current usage, set me up good for at least the next ten years. Lastly, and this one is most important, with Picasa I have very few limits on what size and how many pictures can be uploaded and processed at one time where as NextGen has very strict limits that often cause me grief without have to first resize before uploading – which becomes and additional manipulation of the picture.
Over the last few days in my spare time of an evening when I have not been occupied by something else I have been looking at WordPress tools to handle the integration of Picasa pictures and albums into WordPress. Key desires were ease of use and manipulation as well as looking good. My first thought was just embed the album using the default embed link that comes out of Picasa Web, but that had limited options on presentation and frankly does not look all that great. After more than a few tries with plugins that did not work or was less than acceptable otherwise, I have settled on the plugin Picasa View used along with the Lightbox2 plugin. The first makes it an easy one line add in to include the album and handles limited formating nicely. The latter, Lightbox2 is where things really look awesome when viewing photos. It gives a slide show type of tool, pops them out to a much larger size and, shadows the around the box while fading the website itself.
Two things remain now, though I can say without doubt all blogs going forward will use this for inclusion photo galleries. First is the question of should I go back and convert the twenty or so albums that exist on old blog entries from NextGen to Picasa or should I leave them alone. The later is easier effort for now, but does require the maintaining of two different sets of plugins going forward. That is something to be determined later. The second issue arises from the widget in the sidebar tool – NextGen allows for complete control over what may show up there, included random images from selected or even all galleries/albums. Of course those are site specific galleries. Plugins to do similar for Picasa to not seem to account for one account serving multiple blogs or some albums not being used on the blog at all. Best I have come up with is one selective album or show random images from the last X albums, neither of which suites my needs very well at this point. May have to actually do some coding and contribute my own to a plugin for WordPress using one of those as a base to start with to solve this.
** – Image is a 3D stylized version of the Picasa logo.
