Ideas for easiest way to post photo albums in blog entries

[greenwayg]

Hi,

I have a s9y blog, and probably half of my entires consist of a photo album (I have a 6 month old kid, and friends and family always want to see more pictures). But I'm seeking a better work-flow for getting the pictures into the blog than I have right now.

My current workflow is:
1) Crop, de-red-eye, misc adjust images in Picasa.
2) Export pictures from picasa as an xml album, at a reduced size (usually 640x480).
3) Upload pictures to webserver using filezilla
4) Make a blog entry with [picasa]dirname[/picasa] in it, utilizing the picasa plugin for s9y.

Are there any ways to accomplish this with fewer steps? I'd like it if there was a way to directly upload the pictures from picasa to the webserver. Google provides an API for doing this on their end, but I'm not aware of a s9y plugin to utilize it. I'd be willing to try to write it myself if that seems like the best way of doing this. Even if I go that route, I don't think it would support the "export as xml album" feature of picasa so I would need a way to markup my blog entries to say "add all the images in this directory/album".

Any better ideas? I'd be open to using something other than picasa to do my photo editing if that makes the problem easier. I do prefer that the images get downsized before being uploaded to the webserver because it takes forever to upload them at full resolution, and I'd just downsize them on the webserver anyway because I don't want to use the bandwidth it would take to serve the full sized images.

Thoughts? Guidance? Random ideas?

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Have you thought about including flickr? Then you could upload your pictures there, they do have nice thumbnail/gallery embed methods that let you flick through the pictures?

The Picasa API also sounds nice. It should be doable to produce a Serendipity plugin that accepts and stores the images. But then also display logic would need to be created, because [picasa...] can only be used when an XML format exists with the picasa data. So either the API endpoint would create a Picasa-lookalike XML format to be displayed, or a new alternate display of all stored images inside the picasa album would be used.

However, that's quite a lot of work, so I'd rather try to look for alternate embedded image displays like flickr...?

Regards,
Garvin

[hyejohn]

My current workflow is:
1) Crop, de-red-eye, misc adjust images in Picasa.
2) Export pictures from picasa as an xml album, at a reduced size (usually 640x480).
3) Upload pictures to webserver using filezilla
4) Make a blog entry with [picasa]dirname[/picasa] in it, utilizing the picasa plugin for s9y.

Well, You're never going to reduce the first, third and last steps. (You'll still do your editing somewhere and no matter what, you'll have to upload your images/gallery weather through filezilla or through another interface and you will also have to create an entry.) So, the only place you can reduce your work is in 2. (You're already pretty efficient!)

So it seems to me that what you need is auto-generation of an album once you upload it? Or am I off?

I'm not totally familiar with Picasa, so I don't know how involved the export is. Can you provide a link to your site to see how it looks now? I am interested in your issue as mine is similar.
~John

[greenwayg]

My current workflow is:
1) Crop, de-red-eye, misc adjust images in Picasa.
2) Export pictures from picasa as an xml album, at a reduced size (usually 640x480).
3) Upload pictures to webserver using filezilla
4) Make a blog entry with [picasa]dirname[/picasa] in it, utilizing the picasa plugin for s9y.

Well, You're never going to reduce the first, third and last steps. (You'll still do your editing somewhere and no matter what, you'll have to upload your images/gallery weather through filezilla or through another interface and you will also have to create an entry.) So, the only place you can reduce your work is in 2. (You're already pretty efficient!)

So it seems to me that what you need is auto-generation of an album once you upload it? Or am I off?

I'm not totally familiar with Picasa, so I don't know how involved the export is. Can you provide a link to your site to see how it looks now? I am interested in your issue as mine is similar.
~John

I agree that 3 steps are neccessary. I'd like it to be only 3 steps, and not 4. And if it only involved 2 desktop applications (picasa, web browser) instead of 3 (filezilla), that would be nice. One way to look at my goal is I would like fewer clicks.

So if I decided to go the Picasa API route, how would I get started (I'm a professional software developer, but I do embedded programming, not web programming in my day job)? How much work would it be overall? It sounds like a potentially fun learning experience and hobby project for me. If I get bored, I may investigate the flicker option. If I don't get bored, then s9y will have a spiffy new plugin (maybe).

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

So if I decided to go the Picasa API route, how would I get started (I'm a professional software developer, but I do embedded programming, not web programming in my day job)? How much work would it be overall? It sounds like a potentially fun learning experience and hobby project for me. If I get bored, I may investigate the flicker option. If I don't get bored, then s9y will have a spiffy new plugin (maybe).

I would gest started with that code example given in the URL you already pointed out. For a first try, I would not even create a serendipity plugin, just a simple "mygallery.php" or whatever file that you use to accept and retrieve the files, and then I would try to make the plugin create a XML file, that you store somewhere inside the picasa web structure on your blog, so that you can use the picasa-plugin just as if you manually uploaded that XML. Once you have that, I could offer help into making your code into a serendipity native plugin.

As for learning PHP, this would be a really expert example. With basic scripting skills (or Java for that matter) I think you should have a working example of accepting the files in a few hours, a day tops. And then reformatting the XML might take slightly longer, but also not really longer than a day...

Of course I could try to help you as good as I can, the more specific the questions, the more precise I can try to give you pointers or code examples, or fixes.

I'd like an improved version of the picasa plugin pretty much!

Regards,
Garvin