Picasa Tips – Use Picasa HTML templates to create a unique story of pictures

Posted on March 29, 2007 at 7:56 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Picasa Tips and Tricks series!

How to setup Google’s Picasa Web Album for newbies!
Google Picasa Tips & Tricks – Creating a slideshow movie of your pictures that you can upload to YouTube or MySpace
Picasa Tips & Tricks – Burn specific pictures for a Gift CD in Picasa
Picasa Tips – Use Picasa HTML templates to create a unique story of pictures
How to use the new Map Your Photos feature in Picasa Web Albums
Quick Picasa tips for organizing your photos
Google Picasa Tips & Tricks – Creating Collections for your photos
Managing photos better in Google Picasa

I just found out that there is something called Picasa HTML templatesand with these templates you can create a kind of designer narrative of your pictures in HTML, instead of just the normal grid thumbnail pic that you click on to get the full image.

These templates are the colloborative work of dozens of talented artists and designers from all around the world. Each one has it’s own unique design and actions to express your photos. And the best part is that it’s all free!!! All of you have to do is download the templates and unzip them in your Picasa web templates directory.

Go here and download the zip file for the set of 8 templates. In order to use the templates in Picasa, unzip the folder directly into the Picasa web templates directory, usually C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\templates. You’ll see some other default folders in there also.

Now, open Picasa and select a folder that you would like to export from the left menu. From the top menu, go to Folder and choose “Export as HTML Page“.

On the first screen of the dialog, choose how large you want your pictures to be when exported, the title of your web page, and the location of the files. Picasa will automcaitally create the HTML file and will create a copy of all the pictures called “images” inside of the folder you specify, so you can easily just take that one folder and upload it or send it to someone and not have to worry about your original files being changed.

Click Next and now you’ll see a list of all the templates currently installed. You can click on each one in the list to get a preview of how the pictures will look. Most of these templates have actions too, so they are not just static HTML pages. For example, the Autoviewer actually slides the pictures over as you click the right and left buttons.