A DOM scripting enhanced template for Picasa (updated)
It took me a while to find a tool to put my pictures on the web that does not create horrible HTML code and isn’t clunky to use. Most picture packages have outgrown their usefulness over the years and have become bloated media browsers with proprietary formats.
Then I discovered Google’s Picasa and was instantly taken by its simplicity and slick interface.
I now discovered that you can “Pimp your Picasa” with own templates and created one myself.
You can download the template as a zip and unpack it to the template folder of your Picasa installation (on my PC this is c->Program Files->Picasa2->webtemplates). The template zip contains all the files in a folder called “dompreview”.
To export images, all you need to do is highlight them, press ctrl+w, choose the template and the image size and Picasa will do the rest.
The template features
- HTML standard compliant output
- Display of the big images in a layer above the thumbnails instead of a new page if the visitor has JavaScript enabled
- Normal “new page” display when JavaScript is not available.
You can tweak the styles.css to your needs.
For a demo check the Santorini Picture Gallery .
The only thing I am missing a lot is that you cannot define alternative text for the images in Picasa, or am I missing something?
Update Following several requests, the large picture will now always stay in the visible area when you have to scroll the page, and not stay glued to the top. All you need to replace in already existing galleries in the dynpreview.js file.
January 4th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Picasa is a nice piece of software for the PC and feels more refined in someways compared to iPhoto on the mac though there are clearly some similarities.
I've never actually used the templating feature being that I've been more into using Flickr but it does look good and your enhancements work well.
January 4th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
You're the man! Thanks. Two days ago I came up with the need for a better template in picasa. Now it is done, thanks to you!
January 4th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
If I understand your question correctly, you're missing a way of adding a personalised caption to each picture...?
Right-click the picture, choose "Add label...", click "New label..." => Write a caption :-)
January 15th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
thanks, nice template!
February 17th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
I will get a problem with the template when I generate an album with around 100 images. When I scroll down and click an image in the last line then the large image is shown on the top of page but almost invisible. I think you have to calculate the top-position depending on the scroll position. Do you have any idea?
September 16th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
I can't seem to get the template to work. I have it in my web/templates folder but nothing happens. What am I missing here?
October 11th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
This seems a nice template - I can't decide between this and the simple viewer one.
Thanks for this.
June 24th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I'm trying to figure out if you download more collage templates for picasa. Does anyone know?
September 20th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
thanks a lot for this nice template.
How can i display the filename in the thumbnails automatiquely?
Thank you