Ivan's Blog

I have been using Picasa for a while to organize my photos on my machine, run a local slideshow, etc. It is a good software for that. I generate my photo albums with the HTML export facility of Picasa which also has a simple template system that lets you adapt the output.

I have recently updated my templates to include some javascript to navigate among the pictures with arrow keys; while I was at it, I also made the output proper and valid XHTML. I have put the template files to this site, in the somebody wants to use them: just download the zip file, deflate it in the web\templates directory of your Picasa installation, and that is it. Picasa will pick up the template automatically from this directory.

Not all my albums use the cleaned up version yet, but you can look at, say, my photos of Amsterdam as an example (I have commented out the copyright statement and the extra calligraphy image from the distribution, you might want to adapt it to your taste…).

By the way, I have also tried out the Picasa Web Album, to see if I could directly use that instead of generating (and uploading) the XHTML myself. I do not think I will use this, though… Although the album feature looks quite nice (see mine, for example), it has a relatively limited amount of space available and one has to pay a yearly fee for some extra space. That, by itself, would be acceptable, but… payment is accepted from US bank account and credit card only! Isn’t that ridiculous? What a parochialism…