Extending Picasa

Extending Picasa

In my never-ending obsession goal to build the easiest, most robust pipeline from digital camera to annotated picture archive to public web albums, I have taken yet another step.

There would be no argument if I were to say that Picasa is one of the best tools for digital photo archiving. It makes it really fun to group your photos in the most appropriate ways and even make non-destructive adjustments. In other words, you can play around with your photos in Picasa, without worry about messing up the originals.

However, there would be much argument is I were to say it was built for making web albums. Don't get me wrong, you can export a webpage, but their templates leave much to be desired.

Enter Mr. XML and Ms. JavaScript.

It seems that the authors of Picasa realized that they don't do a great job with exporting webpages and decided to output a basic XML file that describes the album; perhaps it was meant to be a catch-all. And because JavaScript has the ability to read XML from a webserver, one could conceivably write a script to read Picasa's XML, and display a webpage.

What would one call such a child of the fruitful union of Mr. XML and Ms. JavaScript? If it were me, the child would be called:

MAlbumScript - Maulik's Album JavaScript - What?! the kid's parents are web technologies! Of course it's name would be weird.

The style isn't particularly dynamic, but it does demonstrate that such an approach can be used to extend Picasa's exporting capabilities.

Never written JavaScript before, so I was kinda hacking my way through (read: apology for lame code), but I plan to clean it up when I get more time... (read: many projects fall ahead of this one in priority)

Update: I have learned that Picasa has a method for extending its web templates. Kudos to them for not forgetting us about us pickier folk. However, somehow, I still think this is cooler for some reason :-P In any case, if you go into

C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\documentation\

you will find instructions on how to do this ...