Producing web pages with Picasa

I've written in the past how much I like Picasa for managing digital photos (for free). One of the features it has is the ability to export a bunch of photos as a web page producing thumbnails, reduced resolution pics for a web page and a html file for the page. It is a pretty nice feature but the default templates are not very interesting.

In the most recent update to our family web page, I wanted to try and completely generate the site with picasa. Jenny spent a lot of time selecting pictures, applying labels/albums to individuals pictures and adding comments to almost all of the pictures. I spent time adding some comments to each label/album. So my requirements for a temple was to make sure that the template handled the album comments as well as comments for each picture.

I first did some obvious searches on Google for picasa tempalates. I was surprised at the lack of templates that were available for a google project that has been available for quite a while not. The most promising ones were some flash templates that looked pretty nice. After trying them I found a number that weren't working very well. First I had to modify some of the flash version detection code to adjust for the newest version of flash.

After trying out many of the various templates, we decided to use the simpleviewer template that seemed to work pretty well. I went so far that I actually updated our website with all albums in this format. When Jenny took a look she noticed that the complete comments for each picture were not showing up. (Also it was not displaying the Album comments, but I had given up on getting those to show up.) Since I could not modify the Flash files used to display the pictures, I could do nothing about the comments so had to give up using the simple viewer as well.

So I figured that Flash was cool, but too hard to get one that fulfilled my requirements of showing the album and picture comments correctly. I did some more searching and came up with picaweb developed in PHP (a language that I didn't have much experience with but was supported by my web hosting service) so I decided to try it out.

I first tried to get it running on my local apache server with PHP but there were some libraries missing so I decided to copy it to my hosting service's web server and it seemed to get past the missing library problems that my local machine had. I made a few more tweaks to the code to get it to display an album correctly and I was on my way. After a few tweaks to the code, I had everything running the way I wanted. It is not the prettiest display but it does display the album and picture comments correctly and I have some control as to how the pages are displayed. Also we can now upload different albums to the web site and the front page will dynamically update with the new album.

The problems I see with Picaweb are that the album sorting is not easily controlled. Currently it sorts the albums alphabetically. Another problem is that the albums have to be 1 word names because they have to be directory names on the web server and unix doesn't do too well with spaces in the directory name.

Anyway, it is working now and hopefully is fairly usable by those who are viewing it.