Photon

UneasySilence’s Blog Post About Picasa for Mac

Really late. What I actually need is the iPhoto ‘08 plugin so I could upload my photos to Picasa. It’s been quite a while since I uploaded my last album to Picasa, and having no Picasa plugin for iPhoto ‘08 made me create my own (note: sluggish) gallery website. At least there’s a way for me to upload my photos in its original resolution, with a bunch of plugins for me to choose from. Besides, Dreamhost is giving me gigabytes of storage to be used for anything I could use it for.

Speaking of Dreamhost. I noticed that I hardly scratched my weekly bandwidth and storage consumption, and thought how the hell can I fill the limits up? Dreamhost seems to be too good to be true (and I’m very glad about it) considering its meek price of $10 a month. Well, that’s a lot if you compute it per year… but hell, it’s still cheap!

Anyways, before I go off-topic, here is the link to download the latest Picasa version for Mac. According to this announcement, the only significant changes they made were: (1) Picasa being built on top of the public Google Objective-C GData Library, and (2) support for iPhoto 08.

Easy Way

1. Make sure iPhoto is quit.
2. Unzip the package you downloaded from this website.
3. Go to your Applications folder, and Ctrl-Click the iPhoto application icon to show a floating menu. Click the “Get Info” menu item. Your iPhoto Info Window should look something like this:

   

4. Press the “Add…” button under the “Plug-ins” tree, and using the Finder popup, find where the unzipped contents of the package are. The unzipped package should have a name “Photon.iPhotoExporter”.
5. Make sure that the Photon plugin is included under the list shown in the image above.
6. Open iPhoto, test and please inform me of any issues.

Not-so-easy Way

1. Make sure iPhoto is quit.
2. Unzip the package downloaded from this site. The package should have a name called “Photon.iPhotoExporter”.
3. Go to your Applications folder and Ctrl-Click the iPhoto application icon. Select the “Show Package Contents” menu item. Doing so should open up a Finder window with a “Contents” folder inside it.
4. In this Finder window, go to Contents -> Plugins. If you find an old existing “Photon.iPhotoExporter” folder inside, move it to Trash, for you should be using a newer version.
5. Drop the just-extracted “Photon.iPhotoExporter” folder to the Plugins folder from the Finder window we opened earlier.
6. Open iPhoto, test and please inform me of any issues.

You could send questions through this blogpost’s comments section, forums, or email.

I now installed a forum so that the comments section won’t clutter much regarding issues, suggestions, etc. I’d prefer using this than emailig me or posting comments on the blog. This way, other users could help you out in solving your Photon problems.

You can register here.

Lately, I mentioned that I am building a Photon Universal Binary plugin for iPhoto, which, previously, enables iPhoto to simply upload the tracks as single-photo posts, which kinda sucks because I always blog photos in batches. I also mentioned that I had a problem uploading my photos using Wordpress, and my guts tell me it’s an XML-RPC thing. Luckily, I remember that Wordpress accepts XML-data without the excess header telling XML version is 1.0. Now, it works for Wordpress, and hail the great power that is open source (for I now am able to edit things inside Photon).

Now my problem is how should I modify it in such a way that I don’t have to recode it from scratch? Well, the good thing about the Photon architecture is pretty extensible, so I was able to add a few features that could ease out blogging a batch of photos. In fact, this blog post is made using the plugin.

All I can say now is… enjoy the screenshot tour of the newly-improved Photon (which could get head to head with Wordpress Export iPhoto Plugin). You can download the latest version here: iPhoto ‘08 – compatible Photon fork.

Select the photos you want to include and try changing their comments to serve as captions

Write the file’s description to serve as photo caption. Make sure that the “Append to existing Description” checkbox is unchecked to be sure of its contents.

After editing all photo descriptions, export using the “Weblog” tab. If you choose to combine all photos in one post, provide a title and a “Prologue” text.

If you’re not sure of how your blog post should look like, click “Settings” from the Export Box, and select the “Entry Creation” tab.

If you always want to compile the selected photos as one, check the lower checkbox for single-posting.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.