When I started working on the Thunderbird Mail posting I figured I’d have a lot of screen shots. So I decided to try using a Picasa web album to host them. I’d already installed the Picasa plug-in for iPhoto. I took the screen shots as I was doing the install and I put placeholders in the article. To try an make life easy I numbered them in order.
After I imported the screen shots into an iPhoto album and touched up a couple of them it was time to work with Picasa.
Upload
I selected the album in iPhoto. It has 18 photos totaling 799KB in size. Two are JPG’s and the rest are PNG files. I select “File” -> “Export” from the menu. I pick Picasa Web (this is the plug-in supplied by Picasa) and sign on. I fill in the description on the Picasa Web export photos screen and leave the rest as the defaults (some of which were remembered from my previous use).
I click “Export and it begins uploading. A status is displayed during the upload.
Once the upload is done a completion message is displayed along with an option to view the album (in the web browser). I go to the web album as the next step is to get the link.
I noticed a difference in sizes. Picasa says the Photos total 1MB while iPhoto says 799KB. I compare individual photos. The JPG’s are the same size in both places. But, the PNG’s are larger in Picasa, some are twice as big.
Updating the Post
I open the blog post in the editor (in source/html mode) and go through the photos in the web album one by one. Each photo has a link “Embed in Blog/MySpace” which I open. This has the HTML code I need so I simply copy and paste to the flags in the article. Since everything is in order it’s quick work to go through and cut/paste the links code into the article. Picasa Web Albums has the typical navigation buttons so it’s easy to go through the photos in order.
In Summary
This doesn’t seem to be a bad solution when I want to take the bandwidth off my server. It really wasn’t much more time consuming than the other methods.
Under lessons learned - I had highlighted the flags for the picture locations. Since I had to edit in source mode this was a complete waste of time and justed added additional code for me to delete.
The Firefox Find feature includes a “Highlight All” option so that made it easy to find the flags. In a way I lucked out that the flags ended up being unique and not a common string in the article. In the future I’ll make sure of it.
Dean’s FCKEditor Plug-In for Wordpress has a full screen feature which also made it east to find things. It’s more of a personal preference, but I found it easy to work with the source editor being the main editor window rather than the popup method other editors use.
My Thunderbird article uses the default html from Picasa. There’s an option to “Hide Album Link”.
