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May 17, 2007

Slideshows for Your Photos


It's the week of the slideshows at Google. After the Gmail slideshow for presentations, Picasa Web lets you create a sleek slideshow for each one of your albums and embed it in your blog. It's not as hot as Monoslideshow, but it doesn't cost $20 either.

The options is available only for your albums (both public and unlisted), but if you change the albums ID and the username in the code you could use it for any album from Picasa Web.


If you want a customizable slideshow and you know some JavaScript, there's an AJAX slideshow control launched by Google as part of their API for feeds. You can use it for any MediaRSS photo feed (like the feeds from Flickr), change the number of images, the scaling, the transition time and other options.

A similar AJAX slideshow available only for Picasa Web Albums, but easy to create even without knowing JavaScript, can be found at this site.

Related:
Google's photo screensaver

9 comments:

  1. Does Flickr have any kind of embeddable slideshow?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Uh-huh.

    Okay the Picasa slideshow works for any picture service that has a feed.


    First go to your Picasa page and copy the code for one of the slideshows. Then go to your picture host and search for a 'feed' or 'rss' button. Click on it and copy the URL. Replace the url in &feed=someurl in your code with the feed. Then delete host=picasaweb.google.com&.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Aw man, I figured they would come along and make something like this.

    Pretty slick.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This makes Flickr such a frustrating experience sometimes. They lack some basic tools. Slideshow is one of them. I wish I had paid for Picasa's premium edition instead of flickr. Picasa is backed by google and are way ahead in product development. Picasa web also comes with greatest(non-pro) PC client. All this makes them the number 1. Yeah flickr released a bigger slideshow(in-built) with black background!! huh!

    ReplyDelete
  5. The embedded albums are ON by default, there should be a way to embed so only visitors would turn them on?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Any public album has a feed and a way to access its content using JSON as part of Picasa Web's API. The slideshow was built using that API.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The tools aren't visible when I log into Picasa. Any ideas?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Try the link I provided you: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/getEmbed or look for "Embed Slideshow" in the sidebar when you visit one of your albums.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Another way is to use ComBoost.
    http://www.comboost.com
    You'll get a free code to add a nice flat screen slideshow to any site.
    Yes Padraic Flickr also has embedded slideshows.

    ReplyDelete

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