KB Easy PicasaWeb

There are many PicasaWeb plugins for WordPress; I counted 8 of them before writing this plugin, and tried using several. (There are now over 50!) Unfortunately, most of them are annoying. Either they have poor documentation, or they require you to insert funny things into your posts, or they are slow, or whatever.

KB Easy PicasaWeb is the easiest, fastest, most visitor-friendly Picasa plugin for WordPress.

• Easiest: This plugin does not require you to insert funny markup into your posts–all you need is a link to a Picasa album, and the plugin does the rest.
• Fastest: The plugin uses efficient caching to keep your blog’s pageloads quick.
• Most visitor friendly: The plugin uses PHP, not JavaScript, so it won’t cause errors or annoying movement when loading. (If you’ve used JS-based Picasa plugins, you’ll know what I mean.) Even your grandmother can view your photos if you use this plugin.

How it Works

I wrote KB Easy PicasaWeb so that there would be an easy, fast way to embed PicasaWeb albums into pages and posts. This is all you do:

1. Download and activate the plugin
2. Write a post (or edit an old one). Somewhere within it, create a link to a PicasaWeb album (on a line by itself).
3. Done. This plugin finds your link, recognizes it as a PicasaWeb link, and converts it into a nicely-formatted series of photos (with captions).

Want the photos to be larger or smaller? No problem–just go to Settings->KB Picasa and change the size.

Why it’s Quick

The first time you view a post with photos in it, you’ll notice a short delay (less than 5 seconds, typically) while the plugin queries PicasaWeb to request the album information. But unlike many other Picasa plugins, the delay occurs only once–the results get cached locally by the plugin for future use.

See a Demo

• If you want to see how the admin page looks, view the screenshots.
• If you want to see how the photos look, check out the photos category on my blog.

Support

If you post your support questions as comments below, I probably won’t see them. If this documentation doesn’t answer your questions, then post your support questions on a post in the KB Easy PicasaWeb category on my blog.