Add Images From Picasa Web Albums in Windows Live Writer
I am a great fan of Picasa Web Albums for three reasons.
First, Picasa web albums gives a hefty 2GB of online storage space which is sufficient enough to store a lot of photos and images. And since Picasaweb has a free plan and comes by default with a Google account, there is no need to host your photos on other websites that ask you to pay a registration fee or put a ban on your account after the trial period.
Second, you can control the privacy of any image stored in your Picasa web albums account and make only selected photos as “Public”. This is useful, since I can share specific photos with my social friends, blog readers, Facebook friends while keep other photos as “Private”
Third, Picasa provides a very useful desktop client which can be used to bulk upload photos or videos to my Picasa web albums account from desktop. Although Picasa’s web uploader works just as fine and there is also an option to upload photos by sending email, the desktop client is useful for non tech savy users.
Adding Photos From Picasa Web Albums in Windows Live Writer
If you’re a blogger and have ever owned a blogspot blog, you might reckon that Blogger stores all the images to your Picasa web albums account. Hence, it might be a good idea to use the same images in your future blog posts, without having to re-upload them on another file hosting service.
The above idea have a couple of advantages. First, you don’t have to worry about where your image is hosted. Second, all the images can be downloaded in your computer using the Picasa desktop application.
If you have migrated your blog from Blogger to a self hosted WordPress platform and want to use the same images stored in your Picasa web albums account, this tutorial will prove to be useful.
1. Download the Picasa Live writer plugin and install it.
2. Start Windows Live writer and click “Insert” from the program menu. Next, select “Picasa photo” from the options.
3. This will open a login prompt where you have to enter the username and password of your Google account.
4. Once you have logged in, the plugin will show all the albums listed from your Picasa web albums account. Select the desired album and click the “Insert” button to add an image in your blog post.
5. You can set the margins, border, width, height and other image properties in the same way as you do in Windows live writer. If you want to retain the image file names without stripping the dashes or underscores, refer to this guide.
Now that you have successfully added photos from your Picasa web albums account into Windows Live Writer, you can publish the blog post. The image will be fetched from Picasa web albums address and you need not worry of running out of hosting space for a huge number of photos and images.
