mPicasaIntegration WordPress plugin

Important Note – Please Read! I am not the original author of this plugin. I have made some essential fixes to it, but there are still bugs. I do not plan to do additional feature development on it. If you have trouble with the “mpiphoto” tag, please let me know. However, I am not offering support for the other tags, as they mostly don’t seem to work. I hope to begin working on my own Picasa plugin for WordPress in April May (I’m currently working on another project). I’ve deliberately not advertised this plugin on the WordPress plugin sites. I’m making my fixes available so others who were using the old version won’t be completely stuck, but I don’t want to attract new users to it. I want to focus my efforts on writing a new plugin rather than doing a lot of patchwork on this one.

The mPicasaIntegration plugin allows you to embed photos and thumbnails from Google’s Picasa into your WordPress site. It was written by Markus Steinhauer, and he last updated it sometime in the Fall of 2006. The plugin stopped working soon after that when Google significantly changed the Picasa RSS feed, which the plugin relies on. Markus and his web site have vanished, and I have not been able to contact him. So I’ve taken the liberty of performing some “emergency surgery” on this plugin to get it at least partially functioning again (Markus released it under a GNU license, so I don’t think he’ll mind).

Markus’ last release was numbered 1.0. I have labeled this one 1.1 alpha. I’m giving it the alpha designation because I have found a number of bugs (some that were already there, and some that have to do with the change in the RSS feed). See the Known Issues listed below. The short version is this: if you want to embed individual photos from Picasa in Wordpress pages and posts, and have those images link to Picasa for the full-size version, then the plugin will perform reasonably well for you. For other things, you will likely run into problems.

Setup and Usage

1. Download the Google Calendar Widget from ottodestruct.com. You don’t need to install the widget, but you will need Otto’s revised version of rss-functions.php. Follow the instructions in his readme file. This is needed because the Magpie RSS reader that comes with WordPress (as of version 2.0.2 anyway) cannot fully parse the new Picasa feed.
2. Download mPicasaIntegratation.
3. Unzip and copy all the files and folders to your Wordpress plugin directory. Give global read and write access to the “cache” directory.
4. Go to the WordPress Plugins tab and activate the plugin.
5. In Options -> mPicasaIntegration, the most important setting is your Picasa username. Disabling image caching is not allowed currently.
6. In Manage -> mPicasaIntegration, click “Add Album” (assuming you already have an album on Picasa!) and follow the instructions on the screen.
7. Click “Show Albums,” and then click the title of the album you just added. The next screen will show you a summary of the photos in the album. You will need the ID numbers to embed the photos in your posts and/or pages.
8. In a post or page, embed a photo like this: [mpiphoto=aa,bb,cc,dd] where aa is the photo-ID, bb the align value (none, left, right, leftclear, rightclear), cc the photo type (thumb, scale) and dd the desired image width (note the maximum is 640).
9. See Markus’ original notes below for information on other tags, but I found them to be buggy and haven’t worked on fixing them yet.

Future Plans

I don’t plan to do further feature development on this plugin. Markus wrote a very ambitious plugin here, but it has bugs. I use only the “mpihoto” tag and I will do what I can to offer support for that tag if you have trouble with it. I am not offering support for the other tags.

Markus’ approach is different from what mine would be, and the feature set I’m interested in is smaller (I mainly want to easily embed individual photos in my posts, not do full album browsing or get involved with comments and ratings). I hope to start work on my own Picasa plugin, probably in May, after I get an unrelated project done. Please use the comment section below to let me know what kind of features you might be interested in. I’m curious to see what others are looking for.

Fixes in 1.1 alpha

1. Can parse the new Picasa RSS feed. Unfortunately the new feed does not include image dimensions like the old one did. I changed the image display function to determine the dimensions at the time of caching, and then update the database entry for the photo. There are other fields missing as well in the new feed, but none of them seem to be critical.
2. Fixed bug with trying to stat the filesize of images that are not yet in the cache.
3. Version 1.0 tried to show the fullsize image locally when you clicked a thumbnail. This worked on pages but not on posts. This is not an easy thing to fix, so at least for now I’ve set the link to go the Picasa page for the image.
4. Update 4/5/07: fixed bug with pubdates when used with the date function. In PHP 5 the date value has to be in integer, but it was coming through as a string.

Known Issues

1. “Divide by zero” error appears sometimes when displaying an image for the first time. This is a race condition between the page display and the image cacher (i.e. the image hasn’t finished caching before the page finishes loading). This error usually goes away when you reload the page. On one occasion I couldn’t fix it with a page reload, so I deleted the image from the cache and tried again, and that worked.
2. The “Synchronize” management function doesn’t always work. I’ve found I sometimes get better results if I wait 5 minutes or so after making a change to an album before trying this. I have not investigated why this is happening.
3. The “Synchronize” function lacks the ability to delete. If you delete a photo from an album in Picasa, it won’t get deleted from mPicasaIntegration.
4. The navigation arrows when using the mpialbum tag don’t work properly. I believe the problem is they are running in reverse order from what you’d expect.

Markus’ Original Notes

Markus had the following information on his site before it disappeared. I was able to rescue this from the Google cache.

More Page Solution

Create a new page and name it something like ‘Gallery’ or ‘Photos’. Write the tag [mpialbumlist] on it. For each album you want to display, you have to create a new page and write the tag [mpialbum=x] (x is the album id) on it. After that remind the page-ID and set it in the mPicasaIntegration Management Panel.

The advantage of this solution is, that you can define the headline for the albums.

If you want to use images from these albums on posts or pages you have to use the following tag syntax. An easier way of integration is already planned and partially coded.

Photos inline with Posts and Pages

The tag looks like this: [mpiphoto=aa,bb,cc,dd] whereby aa is the photo-ID, bb the align value (none, left, right, leftclear, rightclear), cc the photo type (thumb, scale) and dd the image width.

Example: [mpiphoto=12,left,thumb,100] would display the thumb of the photo with the id 12 left aligned with floating text around it and a width of 100 pixels.

Example: [mpiphoto=12,none,scale,400] would display the photo with the id 12 centered (depending on the theme style) breaking the text and a width of 400 pixels.

I hope that you find this plugin useful. If you have any questions, bugs or suggestions, feel free to post a comment. It would also be great to hear if someone installed it successfully.