Two simple tools to make your picasaweb album more stylish

One of the most important steps in being a good photography is to also let other people in the world see your work.  You can be the most amazing photographer but without sharing, no one will appreciate that.  With the luxury of internet in this era, there are a number of web album that allows free photo sharing.  The two most popular places are Flickr or Picasaweb.  While most professional photographers tend to like Flickr better, I personally choose to use Picasaweb because of the ease in sharing file via powerful integration with picasa application.  Picasaweb allows you to upload, I believe, up to 2GB for free and offer more space with reasonable price.  I have been using picasaweb over the past two years and have seen many improvements of the software, including new tagging system, face recognition, and so on.  One of the drawback of this web album is its mundane template.  I don't have any problem with the google classic style per se, but always want something a little bit more stylish, especially when doing assignments for friends and clients.  A nicer more professional template will certainly gives a big improvement. Enough said for the intro.

So, I recently came across the two following web tools that will allow you to improve the look of your picasa web album. The first one is a chrome plug-in that will create slideshow toolbar, and the second is Cooliris that will generate really fancy 3D showcase for your album. Before I get into more details about each tool, I just want to mention that it is always more pleasing to view your web gallery in fullscreen mode. I believe that you can just press F11 in most web browsers.

Download Chrome slideshow toolbar

This plug-in gives a conventional 2D filmstrip format. The plug-in definitely helps enhance the original picasaweb template.  Combining with full-screen view, you can enjoy your time viewing the photos.  After installation, you will see the slideshow toolbar at the bottom of the browser when viewing picasaweb. Simply click on one of the image to enter the slideshow mode. The plugin also comes with easy buttons to share the photos in facebook, twitter and buzz.

Download Cooliris

This tool is a more stylish version of the Chrome slideshow.  In short, you can view the filmstrip in  3D!! You can move your mouse to rotate the photos, with zooming and panning.  The tool is free of charge and available for all popular web browser.  The neat part about this tool is that it also work for videos, text, and even more (even on files on your local hard drive).  A quick side note in using this tool for viewing picasaweb album is that it works best only for public album.  Once you install the software, you will see the cooliris icon at the bottom left of each photo in your picasa web album.  If your album is public, the tool will populate the 3D template with all the rest photos.  If your album is however unlisted, I found that it only shows one single image that you clicked on.  There are still a lot more features with this simple, yet elegant plug-in.  Definitely worth a try!!