I spent another hour or so looking around at the different picasa plug-ins available and wasn’t able to find anything. The problem is that I want my images to be mixed up with the text from my blog post. I want people to scroll vertically down the page looking at the images and reading the descriptions. Here are some of the benefits of this method:
The images and descriptions are actually embedded into the HTML.
The images and descriptions would be included in the XML content feed.
The images and descriptions would be indexable by Google.
The images and descriptions can be mixed with the actual blog post.
You could easily move around the images and descriptions within the blog post to add content above, in between or below the images.
Other cool things that could be done to make it more useful:
when you go to copy the HTML from the gallery you could: change the image size, modify embedded CSS properties such as border, padding, descriptions style, etc. once you have the images looking like here on your weblog you would click the “copy HTML” button. You could also modify the order in which images are shown. You could also select which images would be shown using checkboxes.
The plug-in would not be limited to WordPress; the code that it would produce would work anywhere on the Internet.
An added benifit of having images in the actual HTML is that your photos will keep working even if the plugin is abandonded…
I’m still using exhibit btw – in WP2.2 – even though I know it’s insanely stupid. Every image attached with this plugin is another hook swallowed, that I’ll inevitably have to pull back out some day…
I dread the day.
Oh, and to get back on topic: exhibit does (did?) a lot of what you’re looking for. You won’t get pure HTML, nor (i believe) Google-friendly image integration. But you will get very a very smooth admin interface (from the Write Post-page, upload, upload zips, generate thumbs, select images, select (optional) previews for the (optional) post-gallery, and so on and so forth).
You can mix thumbs and full size images with the text of a post. You can set custom CSS for your images and thumbs. In fact, there’s so much that can be done with this plugin I still haven’t (after 3> years of use) tried it all. I mostly add a bunch of images to a post, select one of the better ones as a preview (a thumb displayed at the top of the post, linking to a javascript popup-gallery for all attached images), and let exhibit handle the rest.
But then again. I’m beating a dead horse here, and you should probably not repeat my misstake. 🙂
Gallery2 integration with WordPress?
WPG2
A new version is under development – see the forums for more information. Feature requests seem to be welcome…
wpg2 does quite a bit of what I need but not nearly all of it. The gallery images are not actually hardcoded into the page. It is done via an I-frame I believe. This is also the case with the new version?
