Blog reborn… (This is not a Phoenix Egg..!)

After several years of inactivity, I finally updated this blog to make it back to work.

The most trouble is the disappearance of “Picasa Web Album” service. There were plenty of photo albums to store in the Google Cloud Service. But it has already been discontinued in 2016.

Picasa Web Albums (PWA) was an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites. The service links with Google’s photo organizing desktop program Picasa. It was discontinued in May 2016 and succeeded by Google Photos which does not support sharing photo albums on the public world wide web. It allowed users with a Google account to store and share photos in public albums with an initial free storage offering of 15 GB, that is shared with Gmail and Google Drive. Storage was unlimited for photos of resolution less than 2048×2048 pixels for Google+ users, and for photos of resolution less than 800×800 for everyone else. Videos shorter than 15 minutes also don’t count towards the limit. Once the storage is full, uploaded photos are automatically resized to fit the resolution for unlimited storage.

It allowed users with a Google account to store and share photos in public albums with an initial free storage offering of 15 GB, that is shared with Gmail and Google Drive. Storage was unlimited for photos of resolution less than 2048×2048 pixels for Google+ users, and for photos of resolution less than 800×800 for everyone else. Videos shorter than 15 minutes also don’t count towards the limit. Once the storage is full, uploaded photos are automatically resized to fit the resolution for unlimited storage.

On February 12, 2016, Google announced that the service as well as the application will be discontinued on May 1, 2016 and March 15, 2016, respectively. Existing users of the application will still be able to use the application. Existing users of the service were advised to use Google Photos, which already stores the photos in Picasa Web Albums and is a new place for viewing, downloading and deleting (but not editing or organizing) the albums along with their meta-data will be created in the future.

Before the ending of Picasa Web Album service, I use the built-in Flash SWF embedded scripts. After 2016, I tried to find several possible solutions, like google slide show of WordPress plugins, but none of them could provide stable and long-term availability.

The good news is, I found one plugin, Embed Google Photos album. It really helps to make the slideshow of Google Photos Album. The feasible cons for me is, it cannot fetch the title of individual images. Really appreciated with
pavex@ines.cz, thanks for the hard work to supply short codes. Another reminding is…. make sure the shortcode is not surrounded by the wordpress automatic appended “<p></p>”.

[embed-google-photos-album link="https://photos.app.goo.gl/xxxxx"]


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