Things you might find useful

Picasa XML Generator

September 11th, 2009

Two years ago I found myself writing a photo gallery application for a custom CMS that allowed you to upload, crop, caption, group and sort your photos for the site’s online galleries. I remember thinking to myself what a chore it was to be reinventing the wheel—there are already excellent free services available that provide this functionality. I wanted the ability to have my client use Picasa to manage his galleries, and view them via SlideShowPro (SSP) on his site. At that time however, support for Picasa’s RSS feeds was not available in SSP.

So, I decided to peek under the hood of their RSS feed and write a script that could parse everything I needed into a nice and tidy XML file that made SSP happy. Using RSS_PHP, a free RSS Parser for PHP, it was just a matter of figuring out how to take what I wanted from the feed. The end result was a simple button in the CMS that would refresh the XML feed for the SSP gallery.

A few months ago I added some functionality and made an interface for it for people to use. I posted the link in some forums where people were looking for help integrating Picasa with SSP, and the guys at SlideShowPro gave it a nod on Twitter. I’m glad I could provide a tool that some people find useful.

Current versions of SSP can accept native Picasa RSS feeds, but if you want total control over your gallery—image sizes, links, captions, private albums—you should give my Picasa XML Generator a try.

http://cnanney.com/picasassp/

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  • http://www.classyconceptdesign.com Calvin

    I was wondering if I could see the actual php for this script. I need to do basically the same thing.

    Thanks!

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    I’ll send you an email that I think will help.

  • http://noneyet Whatcha

    Could I possibly get that code as well?

  • http://gallery.cihak.sk zadow

    Hi,

    I found this tool very useful. To be honest, my website now depends on XML files generated by your script. I am wondering if you possibly could provide me the source code. I want to automatize the process of generating XML files from picasa somehow. You know the situation when you upload new pictures to picasa and then have to genereate new xml files manualy.

    Thanks a lot.
    Regards,
    Zadow

  • Erwin

    Hello Chris,

    I like your Picasa XML generator very much. However, I was not able to include private albums. i also noticed that the RSS url of private albums do not contain an authkey. I'm I doing something wrong or did Google change something.

    Best regards,
    Erwin

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    Erwin,

    When you are viewing a private album on Picasa Web Albums, the 'RSS' link on the right of the page is the link you want to use, and in the URL you'll see there is an authkey variable. I just checked and no changes have been made on the Google side of things, and copy-pasting that link into the XML generator worked for my private albums.

  • Aa

    Chris,
    Thanks for your reply. I rechecked, but no authkey variable here. Here is an example: http://picasaweb.google.nl/data/feed/base/user/xxxxxx/albumid/5504947419460617137?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=nl
    The only thing I changed is the user name; i changed it in xxxxxx.

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    Weird. You can just manually add the authkey variable yourself to the RSS url. Find out what the authkey is by looking at the URL for the “Link to this” button right above the “RSS” button.

  • Aa

    Hi Chris,
    I found out what the misunderstanding was. Picasa actually offers three, rather than two access level: public access, access to everyone with a link to the album and private access only. In the later case authkey value is present in the RSS link, neither is a “Link to this” button available. But the XML generated with your tool when the access level is “everyone with link” will remain working also after switching to the private access level.
    Best regards, Erwin

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    Great, thanks for the info.

  • JonathanB

    Hi,
    Love the script you made, makes every work smooth with SSP. Wondering if you could provide me with the script so I could automate and embed it.
    Thanks!
    Jon

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    Sure, I’ll post the source this week.

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    Here you go:

    https://bitbucket.org/cnanney/picasassp

    I’ll write a post about it soon.

  • Erwin

    Hello Chris,

    I’m still using your valuable tool. However, I’m experiencing a problem lately. The picasa RSS feeds are using https lately. I’m still able to generate the XML with correct links with your tool, but Slideshowpro will no longer display the linked photo’s . I guess this is caused by the https links.

    Any ideas?

    Best regards,
    Erwin

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    Yeah, private albums started using https for their images. SSP won’t display https content?

  • Erwin

    At least not in my flash website. Did you ever try?

    Erwin

  • http://cnanney.com Chris Nanney

    I don’t know… I don’t use SSP for anything :)
    You can just use the script directly to replace https with http:

    https://bitbucket.org/cnanney/picasassp/

  • Erwin

    Thanks for the suggestion. Replacing all instances of https by http in the RSS feed indeed solves the problem.

    Best regards,
    Erwin

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