Picasa Web Albums introduces embeddable Flash slideshows

Filed under: Design, Internet, Blogging, Google, Social Software

Picasa Web Albums introduces embeddable Flash slideshows

by David Chartier May 17th 2007

Look out Flickr, Picasa Web Albums just dropped a fancy new feature that makes it all too easy - and sexy - to share photo albums. Google's web-based photo sharing service has introduced an Embed Slideshow feature that offers a snippet of code one can easily use to display an album on their website or blog. It's pretty flexible too: five size options are available, ranging from Small 144px wide all the way up to Extra-extra Large at a whopping 800px wide. Captions can also be toggled on and off, and it's all wrapped up in a pretty Flash slideshow movie with controls that only pop up when you mouse over it.

This is a great feature that should definitely turn some heads towards Picasa (including Mac users, now that they offer a free iPhoto plugin), though their 1GB (and growing!) free storage limit is still a little too constricting. Sure, the service offers commercial upgrades with more yearly space, but those prices are a bit on the 'spensive side considering how far and fast storage costs are dropping as of late.

Tags: embed, embeddable, flash, images, photos, picasa, picasa web albums, PicasaWebAlbums, pictures, slideshow, web albums, WebAlbums

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jonathan Harford said 4:07PM on 5-17-2007

Dammit. Why didn't Google buy Flickr? Picasa/Flickr integration would be incredible. (PowerSnap reaches for this ideal.)

Wouter Van den Bosch said 7:01PM on 5-17-2007

I love Google, but so far I'm still using Flickr to store my images. Mostly because most of my friends have Flickr, so it's easier to share those pics you don't want to share with the rest of the world. Then again, being a fan of integration and already a big fan of Picasa, I guess it won't take long before I make the switch.

I've been embedding my flickr sets for a while now thanks to this great guide : http://paulstamatiou.com/2005/11/19/how-to-quickie-embedded-flickr-slideshows/

tony hill said 8:16AM on 5-18-2007

Great facility but I can't use it untill there is an option to slow the slide show down or choose your own speed like in existing the online option and to be able to shrink the font on the captions which on my photos means the whole page is filled with captions at 400 pixels wide and it looks silly even at 800

Will said 8:48AM on 5-18-2007

Picasa's great and all, but its storage rates are outrageous. Check out www.phanfare.com instead.

Bill said 9:06AM on 5-18-2007

Wow, as cool as this is, their code simply doesn't work in Wordpress and that's a deal-killer for me. Maybe I could find some obscure plugin written two years ago that might work while not break all my other plugins but I just don't have the time.

This is a step in the right direction though. Why oh why isn't this feature available everywhere? It seems like everybody wants it.

char said 7:55AM on 6-01-2007

Great feature, but it does not work with blogger. There is always an error code saying that "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Closing tag has no matching opening tag: " So, no good.

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