Biffopolis

While setting up this blog, I needed a quick and easy way to get photos from my computer up onto my website.  I didn’t want to be messing around opening my FTP manager, creating thumbnails and jumping through all those hoops.  I use Picasa to manage all my photos on my computer, so ideally it would hook up to that easily.

What I came up with was using NextGEN Gallery for WordPress.  It seemed like a pretty easy way to manage my albums and galleries without getting too involved.  I was also able to utilize Picasa’s experimental publish to FTP feature.

Heres how to get started:

1. Install NextGEN Gallery for WordPress.  Once you’ve got that installed, you’ll want to make the following changes:
   In the Options menu -> General Options: Make note of the gallery path.  You’ll need this for Picasa later.
   Options -> Thumbnails: Choose the size of your thumbnails.  150×150 should be perfect.
   Options -> Images: Chose how big you’d like the full-size images to be.  The width here should be less than your overall width of your template.  I’d suggest 800×600.
   
2. Find the pictures you want in Picasa.  Hold them in your selection box in the bottom left of your screen (Ctrl+click to get them there)
3. In Picasa, click Tools->Experimental->Publish to FTP
   
4. Choose an appropriate resolution (again, I reccommend 800×600) and a folder name
   
5. Choose XML Template, Press next
   
6. Now it will ask for the FTP account information.  Click on create new account.
7. Enter your relevant informaion.  Make sure you set the FTP path as your gallery path from step 1.  Verify the account just to be sure you entered everything properly.
   
8. Once Picasa has finished uploading to your website, log back into WordPress.
9. In the Gallery Admin, click on Add Gallery / Images -> Import Image Folder.  Type the name of the gallery used in Step 4 and add /imagess/ to the end of it.  eg. /wp-content/gallery/car-tranny/images/  press Import Folder.  This should now grab all the images Picasa put on the server and make your gallery with thumbnails.
   
10. Using the Album section in the Gallery admin, you can create your album page.  Alternativly, you can import your gallery directly into a page using the plugin with NextGEN gallery.

Tags: biffis, nextgen, photo gallery, picasa, wordpress

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