In my previous post, I experimented with putting my photos on Picasa. I’ve been posting my photos to my own site until now, but it’s a real chore. Also, I severely hacked my Coppermine installation to make it do some things I wanted, which has made it hard enough for me to upgrade that I haven’t done so. For a long time I was thinking about writing my own photo management application, but never had the time. Picasa’s come along and it does about 80% of the things I’ve been wanting, so I want to start putting my photos there. The trick is getting it to integrate with WordPress.

I looked for a plugin, and found folks discussing the mPicasaIntegration plugin. It’s a plugin that reads the Picasa RSS feed and stores data from it in custom tables, and then caches images as it needs them from Picasa. The only problem is that the plugin’s author and his website vanished from the web a few months ago, and I couldn’t find the code. So I was emailing people who I found were using it, and a kind person sent me a copy. He also informed me that it no longer worked. Google had significantly changed the Picasa RSS feed, which broke the plugin.

The time I normally set aside for blogging has been consumed the past few days by trying to fix it. I have it reading the RSS feed correctly again, but unfortunately some of the data the plugin relied on is no longer in the feed, so some of its features will need to be re-thought. In a few days I should have it working well enough so that at least some of the key features are working. Then I’ll post the code, as I know there are others who have been trying to track down this plugin as well (the author released it under a GNU license, so I don’t think he’ll mind).