I am trying to decide what to use for managing pictures on this blog.
I have installed NextGEN gallery and put up a trial album – nice and easy to make captions, tags and so on. It even makes thumbnails automatically. The only problem is that I have to resize the original images manually (well, using the batch resize process in Microsoft Picture Manager) before uploading – either by FTP or into a zip file and using the built in uploader.
Then I remembered Picasa, which I used to use to share pictures with family (then Facebook came along). Lo and behold there are a number of plugins that can call pictures from Picasa and display them in my blog. Some of the features I like are: you can assign captions and tags on your home computer (useful for browsing off-line; you can choose the resolution to use when uploading to Picasa (saves on bandwidth and online storage); geo-tagging (see where the pictures were taken on Google Earth) and that the images are not served from my webspace, so reducing usage of my bandwidth allocation. There are also a couple of Facebook add-ons that will let me upload from Picasa to Facebook and another one that give me a Picasa tab in Facebook.
The question now is whether the Picasa plugins can look as nice and be as versatile as NextGEN looks?
I will be reporting back soon.
The report back: I installed Shashin, it’s quite simple and does what I need it to do. Single images, random images, album thumbnails. Look around the blog and you’ll find it here and there.
