Restyle your Picasa Web Albums - show your photos on your site!
When you have a Picasa Web Albums account you know it's a nice place to store up to 1 Gb of photos. You can organise all your pictures in albums, tag and geotag them. The Web Albums even work together with the free Picasa application. Uploading from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums is a breeze. Using the new Sync to Web option even updates your on-line Albums automatically. One of the drawbacks of Picasa on-line is that the lay-out of these web albums is rather uninspiring.
See this YouTube tutoral video on PWA
Fortunately there is a Google API to extract data from the Web Albums to other aplications, including other web pages. I found this very nice piece of Javascript and reworked it to create a restyled Web Albums gallery that will display all the public albums and attached pictures from any user.
What does it look like?
Hey, you can see this in action in two different flavours and with your own pictures. Right on this website. Assuming you have some public albums in Picasa Web, of course. More designs will follow in the near future.
For those of who don't have a free Picasa account yet, get it here. Be aware of the fact that Picasa itself can be used without a Web Albums account. And all the free templates on this site also do not rely on such an account.
Just tap in your username and hit the submit button. The gallery page will remember your username as long as you do not close your browser. And if you like it you can download all the files you need for free (see below).
Get your username by looking at the picasaweb.google.com url. Click on any album and you'l see something like this in the address bar: http://picasaweb.google.com/paulvanroekel/Pairs#. This url contains your username (here it's paulvanroekel )
How do I get this?
Download this zip file. It contains separate folders for each style now available (without the ads in the demo) , and unzip the contents. Open the index.html file (use a html editor or Notepad) and look for this line:
script type="text/javascript">username='YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE'; photosize='800';
Replace YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE with your Picasa Web Albums username (this is not your Google account login name) and you're ready to go. Upload all the files and start enjoying you're restyled Picasa Web Album pictures.