Polaroid on the Fly

Creates polaroids of images on the fly for thumbnails in posts. Support for lightbox included. Built on modified Polaroid-o-nizer v0.7.2 sources.

I wanted to mimic the Polaroid look that you can achieve with Google Picasa to add thumbnails to my posts. I found a plugin titled WP-Polaroidonizer that did what I wanted to some extent but it didn’t have the right feel to it.

The other problem I have with Polaroid-o-nizer and WP-Polaroidonizer is the lack of security. When I mention lack of security there is by default no way to restrict external sites and users from generating Polaroid pictures using your installation of Polaroid-o-nizer.

The goal of this plugin was to use rel= style html img tags to transform a simple URL into a Lightbox URL in which there is a thumbnail image in your post which is linked to an image that can be loaded using Lightbox or any of the Lightbox clones/alternatives.

Requirements

1. PHP GD Module
2. Lightbox – Not really a requirement but a recommendation if you want to have a nice ajax/javascript image overlay on your page.

Upgrade

1. Deactivate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
2. Delete the previous polaroid-on-the-fly folder from the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
3. Upload the new polaroid-on-the-fly folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
4. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Usage

1. Create an image link in your post in the following format:

2. Be sure to include rel="polaroid" as this activates the plugin.

3. If alt="Picture[album]" is included the portion listed here as Picture will be displayed as the image title in Lightbox and the portion listed as [album] will group multiple pictures into an album called album. The alt tag is not required and if used the [album] portion is not required. Read the Lightbox usage for more details on Titles and albums.
4. Be sure to place each html img tag on a separate line.
5. This plugin supports the following image formats: jpg, png, gif

NOTE:

Do not use the visual editor for doing the above use the code editor.

To Do

1. Add features for x and y offset
2. Add features for rotation angle
3. Add additional error reporting for the offset and angle
4. Add functionality to options page to generate a URL for placement elsewhere on the site.
5. Add functionality to cache the polaroid images.