Change Your Picasa Image Titles
I've had a problem since I created the Pictures section of my website and that is that my individual image pages are not included in my site's Page Count according to Google (see what I mean). This is a problem since I have a few thousand images and they would greatly increase the number of pages on the site. I figured that since I have unique content on each one (the image description and any comments entered), they should count. I brought this up to an SEO-specialist friend of mine and the first thing he pointed out is that the page titles are virtually identical across a single album. This is because I use the image title according to Picasa, which is the filename when I uploaded it to Picasa, which is whatever my camera named it or whatever generic name I came up with when I imported them from the camera. I couldn't think of anything better to use for the title and unfortunately Picasa does not offer an easy way to change the image titles.
The answer to my problem is the Picasa Image Name Updater by yours truly, Cameron Hinkle. Harnessing the power of my Lightweight PHP Picasa API, I whipped up this handy little app in just about 12 hours. Now I can update images in my Picasa account at my every whim- and you can too! I created it using AuthSub, which means you sign in to your account on Google's site and then just grant access to my app. You then type in the account you want to update, select an album, and start updating image names! I tried to model the interface after Picasa's web interface for entering captions, although I'm not a Javascript programmer so I didn't use any AJAX.
This was a great exercise in eating my own dog food. I was happy to find that things went relatively smoothly and I was able to do all the backend programming in about seven hours, which is pretty solid given the complexity (yes, that means the style took me 5 hours...I'm so bad with CSS it isn't funny). If you want to have nice-looking image titles on your account, try it yourself and feel free to leave any feedback you have here. I'd love to know what people think.
Comments
I'm glad people like the ability to change image titles as well as the API itself.
As far as getting comments for just one user, I was curious myself so I looked in the documentation and here's what I found:
"To get comments specific to an image, use getImageById() and call Picasa_Image::getComments() on the returned object."
So you can't grab the comments directly, but I don't think grabbing the image is too much overhead. What do you think?
Hi,
Just out of curiosity, does your api have any way of accessing the comments of one particular photo (by photoid, for example)? From looking at the documentation, it seems that comments can currently only be retrieved by album or id. Great work, anyway.
Hi there,
I wasn't sure where to post this comment but just wanted to say I'm loving your api. I just ran a test comparing the zend framework and your api, retrieving an album containing 400 images. Your api consumed 14mb of system memory (according to php's memory_get_usage function). Meanwhile, the zend framework consumed 64mb - 4.5 times more than your api! Good work man... hope you keep it up.
Nice work! Just tested is on one of my albums and it is working perfect.