Update 5/29: Beta testing is done, and Shashin 2.4 is now available for download at WordPress.org

Shashin 2.4 has several new features that people have been asking for. It’s available on my site only as a beta release. I’ll upload it to wordpress.org after I get feedback on the beta. If you can contribute a translation, a .pot file is included.

New features:

• Support for image viewers other than Highslide, such as Lightbox, Fancybox, etc.
• Display album photos using the order you’ve set in Picasa.
• Customizable pagination of album photos.
• New settings for customizing Highslide’s borders, navigation bar, and background color/opacity.
• Dynamically set thumbnail sizes and the number of thumbnail columns to suit your WordPress theme (this means you don’t have to worry about images being too large or small if you switch to a wider or narrower theme).
• Show camera EXIF data in Highslide captions.
• Improved usability for the Shashin admin screens, with detailed examples of Shashin tags.
• Align images and groups of thumbnails to the center.
• Specify an alternate image to use as a thumbnail – this is often useful for videos.
• Includes the latest version of Highslide (4.1.4)

Download Shashin 2.4 Beta

Upload the new files, deactivate and reactivate Shashin in your plugins menu, and then go to the Shashin settings page to configure the new features. There’s help text there, which should be sufficient for most of the new features, but a few require more explanation:

• Dynamically setting thumbnail sizes: if you indicate the width of your theme’s content area in the Shashin settings menu, you can use the word “max” instead of specifying a Picasa image size in your Shashin tags. Shashin will then figure out which Picasa image size to use. This is very useful because it means you won’t have to go back and edit all your tags if you change to a wider or narrower theme in the future. For example, if the width of your theme’s content area is 610 pixels, and you use “max” with the simage tag for a single image, Shashin will pick 576 as the image size (the largest Picasa size that will fit in the available space). If you use “max” as the image size with sthumbs, srandom, or snewest, Shashin will do the math to determine the correct size for the thumbnails based on the number of columns you specified. Note that “max” doesn’t work well for photos with a portrait orientation, as the size will be applied to the height instead of the width.
• Dynamically setting the number of thumbnail columns: you can also use “max” to indicate the number of columns in sthumbs, srandom, and snewest. Shashin will figure out the number of columns based on the image size. For example, if you set the image size to 160, and your content width is 610, your thumbnails will be displayed in 3 columns. You cannot use “max” for the image size and the number of columns at the same time. Shashin needs one to be a number so it can calculate the other.
• Centering images and using alternate thumbnails: I actually slipped these in to version 2.3.5, and they are documented here.

The Shashin documentation page is not updated yet for the new features. I’ll update it after version 2.4 is out of beta.