Creating a PostcardViewer gallery with Picasa
These instructions show you how to create a PostcardViewer gallery by using Picasa. This is probably the easiest way to create a PostcardViewer gallery. Once you have created your gallery you can upload it to your web server. Picasa is Google's free image editing and organising software (Windows only).
To create a PostcardViewer gallery using Picasa, follow these steps:
1. Install Picasa
If you don't already have it, download and install Picasa by clicking the button below.
2. Install PostcardViewer Picasa Template
Download the PostcardViewer Picasa Template here (NOTE: this is a different file than the regular PostcardViewer download). Unzip the folder and copy it to your Picasa web templates folder (usually C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\templates).
3. Create PostcardViewer gallery
Open Picasa. Select the images you want to make a gallery from and click Folder-> Export As Web Page... Select your image size and gallery title. In the Select a Web Page Template page, select PostcardViewer. Click Finish. The gallery will be generated and displayed in a new browser window.
4. Edit gallery options (OPTIONAL)
Once you have created your PostcardViewer gallery, you can optionally tweak some of the gallery options by editing the generated imageData.xml file using a text editor (e.g. NotePad, TextEdit). Specifically you may want to change the cellDimension value to be higher than the size of the images in your gallery. Options can be set as follows:
- cellDimension: Pixel width and height of the square cell that contains images.
- columns: Number of image columns.
- zoomOutPerc: Image scale percentage when zoomed out (set this to a lower value if you have too many images to fit in the browser ).
- zoomInPerc: Image scale percentage when zoomed in.
- frameWidth: Width of image frame in pixels.
5. Set your gallery background color (OPTIONAL)
To set the background color, edit index.html. Enter the hex color value as the last parameter in the FlashObject code line:
var fo = new FlashObject("viewer.swf", "viewer",
"100%", "100%", "6", "#ff00ff");
6. Upload gallery to your web-server
Use the FTP program of your choice to upload the generated folder to your web-server.