Photo Galleries For Your Website Using Picasa

In this Posting I will go through the steps to add photo galleries to your website using Picasa.  This will not include the normal photos that you have as part of your web page design – in your header and body area.  Instead it is a method to show a photo gallery.   This is a sample to show you my Picasa Gallery – Clouds folder.

Clouds

Photographs are a great way to share a visual experience with your website viewers.  Or perhaps you are a photographer and want to share photographs.

There are several methods that I have tried out – and there are lots more.  So feel free to add your comments and suggestions with us.

PICASA

I am using Picasa to manage my photos on my computer.  It is available for free from Google (download here) but is just available in Windows versions .   The flow that I find useful:

• Import your photos from your camera – and put them in folders
• Review the photos and delete any bad ones
• Add TAGS (keywords) to the photos
• STAR the best photos

When you decide you want to upload photos then:

• Do a SEARCH on the keyword + STAR photos (so you will just get the best
• Review and add the photos to your selection box on the bottom of your screen – click the little green circle to HOLD the images there.
• Then click UPLOAD.  The first time you do this you have to add the settings for your online google account.
• Either add the photos to an existing folder – or make a new folder in your online galleries.

To make your SLIDESHOW for your website or blog.

• Go to the folder that you want to have as a slideshow
• On the right column click on the “Link to this album”
• For your website click on “embed slideshow” – this creates the code and uses shockwave.  Blogs like wordpress cannot display shockwave – so if you are in WordPress – click on the “Paste HTML to embed in the website”
• Then add the code to your web page or blog and test it out.

See a sample of the slide show on this web page.

Picasa also has a nice feature to upload your photos to Facebook – or to Blogger.

Try it out and send a link to your slideshow in the comment area.

UPDATE – March 12, 2011

I have just moved the blog to self hosted and using WordPress.COM — this enables me to show the slideshow here on the blog posting.  Let me know if you are able to view it and any comments.