Added a wordpress Picasa plugin

20May/0717

Added a wordpress Picasa plugin

Just finished a minor change to my blog, added a random picasa images plugin.

I did have to do some minor tweaking as there is no real good plugin available (readily working I mean).

I started from the following: PicasaWeb wordpress plugin by Rawlison which worked (partly) and used the user interface of Vague Dreams plugin, after trying many others.

The link to image didn't work, and there was no space between the images, so I added/changed that.

You can visit my Picasa Web Album Widget page for the new plugin and the install guide

It seems that the normal rss functions of wordpress just can't handle the rss of picasa web albums.
My plugin incorps. a piece of the Zend framework specifically for this. (upload of +6 Mb if you want the full framework, I took what I needed and ended with a 580 kb)

After I managed to make this work I altered the plugin so that it behaves as I wanted, namely as a sidebar widget with a control panel !

See the image below for the control panel provided for this plugin:

Update 22/5/2007:
When using WordPress 2.2 make sure you do not activate the sidebar widgets plugin as it is already included in the core functionality of wordpress !!

Update 5/6/2007:
Just uploaded version 6.2 with some bugfixing and stabilizing done by Adam Brown.

If you need more info on this subject, or if I missed something, ... drop a comment !

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Comments (17) Trackbacks (0) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Lim
June 8th, 2007 - 13:32

Hi,
Could you please tell me where I can get the Picasa Album ID from? I’ve tried look around Picasa but can’t find it.

Thanks.

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Lim
June 9th, 2007 - 00:26

Awesome! worked like a charm. Thanks for the email. I never noticed there was a rss link at the bottom of the page Damn google for their smart post processing. :p

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Paul
June 9th, 2007 - 09:35

Hey:) Thanks for the widget.. its exactly what I’m after. A quick question…. i’m wanting the thumbnail to be less than the 144px option- say 100px. How can i edit the widget file to set it to a smaller size?

Thanks.

Paul.

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Kivela
June 12th, 2007 - 11:42

Hi,

Sure you can do that. But… Picasa itself renders the thumbnails only in those resolutions natively, so what you can do is let the browser resize the thumbnail by opening the widget php file and editing line 161

Now it says:
alt=”‘.$image['title'].’” />
change that to:
alt=”‘.$image['title'].’” style=”width:100px” />

And the images should become smaller…

Kind regards,
Stefan

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Kivela
June 12th, 2007 - 11:44

To determine the album id you should do the following:

Go to your gallery / album as in
http://picasaweb.google.com/stefan.venken/Pets

(but on your own picasa site ofcourse)
then when you click the rss link down right below, you’ll see the album id

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/stefan.venken/albumid/5066643161481670977?kind=photo&alt=rss&hl=en_US

the album id is then 5066643161481670977

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Benjamin
June 26th, 2007 - 22:18

Thanks for the wonderful Picasa plugin. Works great on my site except for one small thing: the frame around the pictures doesn’t have the correct size on my page. Might also be a problem with the native widgets plugin.

Any way to correct this? I appreciate any help…

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Axel
June 27th, 2007 - 16:18

Since yesterday i have the same problem, the plugin works fine, but the resizing of the images doesn’t. All the days before the resizing was o.k. It looks like the …?imgmax and crop=1 options in the generated img-link do not working any more ?

For the first i addes a width=”…” in the source code, but this doesn’t look as nice as the original.

Any suggestions?

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Kivela
June 28th, 2007 - 00:45

Just updated the plugin, so all should be working fine now, will email you the new version so that you can check it first hand. Thanks for the tips!

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Benjamin
June 28th, 2007 - 01:21

Thanks for the quick update. Sad to say it doesn’t fix my problem. My frame or border around the pictures is too small. Please take a look at my website. I put the plugin via widgets between ‘archive’ and ‘meta’. Notice that meta doesn’t move down.

Thanks again.

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Benjamin
June 28th, 2007 - 01:29

I just noticed that this only happens in Firefox. IE displays it correctly.

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roland
July 13th, 2007 - 21:35

hi,

thanx for the plugin. simple, straight and just what i wanted. just one thing would be nice: how can i organize to have square thumbnails?

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Laundro
August 13th, 2007 - 20:49

Hello,

Awesome plugin.

Any chance you could add a function to show only the latest or last album thumb?

Thanks!

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Manish Gupta
November 20th, 2007 - 18:46

Thanks for the plugin – this works perfectly. Would be nice if we can add a small functionality wherein it could also display captions along with the pictures, or show them on mouse-over – is it doable?

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Colin
August 22nd, 2008 - 06:01

hey, added the Picasa plugin, trying to center the images in my sidebar to little luck (not very skilled with php)… any ideas?

see colinhelb.com

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Colin
August 22nd, 2008 - 06:01

BTW… I love it too.

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Leonti
November 6th, 2008 - 04:06

And again about this. If the search engines learn to understand the meaning, the bloggers have poizgolyatsya to be readable and do not like the others.

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Cindy Minish
December 28th, 2009 - 18:27

As a Newbie, I am always searching online for articles that can help me. You blog reAlly helped me and I will be back soon. Thank you

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