How to Use the 4 Simpleviewers (and others) for Picasa Web Albums
One of the drawbacks of Picasa on-line is that the lay-out of these web albums is rather uninspiring. This site offers several solutions to integrate your Picasa Web Album photos in your own website. This page gives more detailed inxtructions for the usage of the Simpleviewer, Autoviewer, Tiltviewer and Postcardviewer for Picasa Web Albums. These instructions also apply to the other php powered viewers.
How to install in 8 steps:
1. Download the zip file you want to use to your computer and unpack it.
2. Open the xml.php (or index.php) file using a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad) or a HTML editor (e.g. Dreamwaver).
3. Look for these two lines:
$userid = 'YOURUSERNAME';
$album = 'ALBUMNAME';
4. Change YOURUSERNAME to your Picasa Web Albums user name. 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 )
5. Change ALBUMNAME into the Picasa Web Album you want to display. Get your albumname 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 albumname (here it's Pairs ). Don't use the "#". In case you want to display all your public images you can skip this.
The Multi Album Viewers displaying more than one Picasa Web Album in one viewer have an extra option to hide unwanted albums. Open the file blocked_albums.css and read the instructions inside carefully. Inserting an album here doesn't make it invisible for public viewing, it only stops it from showing up in the navigation of the multi album viewer..
6. Optionally look for these lines:
$feedURL = "http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/$userid/album/$album?imgmax=912";
// $feedURL = "http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/$userid?kind=photo";
7. The first line of code is setup to read the album you specified before. The second line is setup to read all your public images. Activate one of them by commenting (adding "//" before it) the other option.
8. Some of the galleries may have additional display options. Check the original documentation for each of the galleries
9. You're ready to go. Upload all the files to your private webspace and enjoy your Picasa Web Albums completely restyled. Make sure your website supports PHP5 and SimpleXML; otherwise this won't work at all. Get the technical details of all this further down this page.
More details
- Retrieving Picasa Web Album photos with SimpleXML
- All the Simpleviewer products
- How to embed these players in a HTMLpage
- The Picasa Web Albums API
- How to check for PHP support
- PHP Function to check the SimpleXML extension is loaded