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Saturday 18 December 2010

Dynamic web page to display Picasa Web Albums

For a while now I've been uploading my vacation photos to the paulregan.co.uk site, in fact that's how it started.  Parents and friends wanting to see the recorded history of our  vacations ..


I've been using JAlbum with the Foto player template.  Which is great and worked really well.  Its slightly laborious to create a new folder but for the 3-4 times a year I needed it worked fine.


I then got hooked on photography and wanted to be able to upload some of my (in my opinion) better shots to the site.  JAlbum was too slow to just throw one or two shots up.  I needed something more dynamic.


I'd been using Picasa & Picasa Web Albums for a while which was a snap to sync between an album on the PC/MAC and the Picasa Web cloud.  Picasa does have a html generating tool with some funky templates but that was more the JAlbum model which I didn't want. 


If only Picasa Web had a pretty embed display, something like the lightbox or zoombox scripts .. before you comment picasa does, your right, it does but its pretty nasty.


I stumbled across www.paulvanroekel.nl ... He writes templates for both Picasa.  And more importantly for Picasa web !  The php code pulls the pictures from all or a designated online album.  Update your album, you site dynamically updates the changes.


Pick the template, download, tweak the config and upload to your site.  Simples.  Almost.


Not sure what causes it, maybe my providers PHP version.  But the template files are all .php.  trying to open them on the web caused :




Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR, expecting ',' or ';' in /home/users/web4831/html/paulregan.co.uk/gallery/index.php on line 97 




Some quick googling had me change the extension from php to php5 - job done


paulregan.co.uk/gallery/index.php5

2 comments:

  1. All really great photos. Makes me feel like I'm not trying hard enough. What editing software do you use -- I like some of the effects. Hope you've had a good break. Speak soon.

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  2. Hey parky .. HNY and thanks for the comments. The HDR pics are a mix of PS & Photomatix pro. The rest is all fluke, lots of it ..

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