• Added support for unlisted Picasa albums (finally!). You must have the PHP curl extension installed to use this feature. I believe most PHP installations include curl, but some hosting providers may need you to ask them to enable it for your account.
• Added ability to group albums by Picasa user accounts when using the [salbumthumbs] tag.
• Bug fix: the EXIF support introduced in Shashin 2.4 caused an error when syncing albums in the Windows version of mySQL. Many thanks to MC for letting me debug this on his Windows server.
• Bug fix: Shashin’s automatic album syncing was interfering with scheduled jobs from other plugins in some circumstances. This is fixed. Note that you also need WordPress 2.9.1 or higher, as this was related to a wp-cron bug in WordPress 2.9.

Also, I’ve installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin, so if you have a support question, you can get an email notification when I reply, instead of having to remember to check back.

UPDATE: I’ve made a couple bug fixes: v2.6.1 fixed another bug related to Windows servers, and v2.6.2 fixed a bug related to Google servers outside the US (see this comment for details).

A couple usability items to point out with it:

• If you mouse over a thumbnail on the left hand side, then the right hand side will show you a larger version of it, and vice versa. I found this a little confusing at first, but it’s actually a good way of using the available screen real estate effectively
• To select a photo, just click it once. Don’t try to drag it. After you click it, you’ll see it appear under the “Selected” heading. If you change your mind and need to remove a photo that you selected, just click it, and it will be removed from the “Selected” area.

The other important new feature is that automatic album syncing is now done every 10 hours instead of once daily. This is because Picasa video URLs now expire every 11 hours, as I described previously. If you have any videos in your albums, then you will want to turn on this feature in the Shashin Settings menu.

There are also two bug fixes:

• “Next” and “previous” links for browsing album photos now work in Google Chrome and Safari (this is actually a workaround for a webkit bug)
• Album title links in the album thumbnails sidebar widget now point to the correct URL

Now back to work on version 3.0…

The expiration time is built-in to the new video URLs, and the videos won’t play after that time passes, even if you’re logged in to Picasa. This leads me to believe that using the Picasa API wouldn’t help (even the code used to display the videos on Picasa’s own pages expires). There’s also a signature key built-in to the URL, so there’s no simple hack to the URL that’ll make it last longer.

The ability to embed videos in your own site was never a documented Picasa feature, so I really don’t have grounds to complain. But I made it a feature of Shashin, so my users do .

I’m traveling over the holidays, but I will try to get a fix released before New Year’s. The only solution I can think of is to change Shashin’s automatic once per day sync’ing feature so that it will sync every 10 hours (an hour before the expiration, to be safe). That way you’ll always have a fresh URL for embedded videos. This won’t be the major new release I’ve mentioned before – it’ll just be a fix for this and a few other minor bugs.

Note: videos added to Shashin more than a month ago still work fine, at least for now. The “old style” URLs in Shashin are still working, and – like I said – they don’t get updated when you sync. It’s only videos you may have added to Shashin within the past month that will give you a problem.

My last Shashin post has about 60 comments, so it’s time for a fresh thread.

I’m back to work on the new version. It’ll include Flickr and Twitpic support, and a WYSIWYG interface for adding photos to posts. I only have at most a few hours a week to work on it though, so look for it around late January.

[srandom=3|7|9,288,2,6,n,left]

It’s also not compatible with the newer shortcode syntax that WordPress currently supports and recommends. I’m thinking of switching to the recommended syntax. So the equivalent shortcode for the above example would be something like:

[shashin type="random" albums="3,7,9" size="288" cols="2" count="6" caption="n" position="left"]

The reason I didn’t use this syntax originally is because it’s a lot more typing. So to make the typing easier, I would also add editor buttons, for both the Visual and the HTML editors. There’s a standardized way to add buttons to the Visual Editor already, and my Koumpounophobia plugin makes it easy to add buttons to the HTML Editor (having buttons for Shashin was my inspiration for creating Koumpounophobia).

New versions of Shashin would have an option to support the old syntax, so you wouldn’t have to rewrite tags in old posts.

So, if I added the new syntax and editor buttons, would you use them, or would you prefer to keep using the old syntax? Please leave a comment and let me know.

And while I’m here: Shashin was one of five image-related plugins (out of the 285 available at wordpress.org) listed in the Weblogs Tools Collection’s article Five Image Related Plugins for your WordPress Site.

(My blog has been quiet recently as I’ve got a big home renovation project going. I’ll post pictures when it’s done. I may not have the opportunity to blog much this month.)

I’m almost done updating the Shashin documentation page. I’ve finished documenting the most important new features. I’ll finish the rest in the next few days.

If you encounter any problems or have any questions, please add a comment to this post.

Shashin 2.4 has several new features that people have been asking for. It’s available on my site only as a beta release. I’ll upload it to wordpress.org after I get feedback on the beta. If you can contribute a translation, a .pot file is included.

New features:

• Support for image viewers other than Highslide, such as Lightbox, Fancybox, etc.
• Display album photos using the order you’ve set in Picasa.
• Customizable pagination of album photos.
• New settings for customizing Highslide’s borders, navigation bar, and background color/opacity.
• Dynamically set thumbnail sizes and the number of thumbnail columns to suit your WordPress theme (this means you don’t have to worry about images being too large or small if you switch to a wider or narrower theme).
• Show camera EXIF data in Highslide captions.
• Improved usability for the Shashin admin screens, with detailed examples of Shashin tags.
• Align images and groups of thumbnails to the center.
• Specify an alternate image to use as a thumbnail – this is often useful for videos.
• Includes the latest version of Highslide (4.1.4)

Download Shashin 2.4 Beta

Upload the new files, deactivate and reactivate Shashin in your plugins menu, and then go to the Shashin settings page to configure the new features. There’s help text there, which should be sufficient for most of the new features, but a few require more explanation:

• Dynamically setting thumbnail sizes: if you indicate the width of your theme’s content area in the Shashin settings menu, you can use the word “max” instead of specifying a Picasa image size in your Shashin tags. Shashin will then figure out which Picasa image size to use. This is very useful because it means you won’t have to go back and edit all your tags if you change to a wider or narrower theme in the future. For example, if the width of your theme’s content area is 610 pixels, and you use “max” with the simage tag for a single image, Shashin will pick 576 as the image size (the largest Picasa size that will fit in the available space). If you use “max” as the image size with sthumbs, srandom, or snewest, Shashin will do the math to determine the correct size for the thumbnails based on the number of columns you specified. Note that “max” doesn’t work well for photos with a portrait orientation, as the size will be applied to the height instead of the width.
• Dynamically setting the number of thumbnail columns: you can also use “max” to indicate the number of columns in sthumbs, srandom, and snewest. Shashin will figure out the number of columns based on the image size. For example, if you set the image size to 160, and your content width is 610, your thumbnails will be displayed in 3 columns. You cannot use “max” for the image size and the number of columns at the same time. Shashin needs one to be a number so it can calculate the other.
• Centering images and using alternate thumbnails: I actually slipped these in to version 2.3.5, and they are documented here.

The Shashin documentation page is not updated yet for the new features. I’ll update it after version 2.4 is out of beta.

Patches aren’t supposed to have new features, but this has a couple small ones, since I had already finished working on them.

1. In addition to floating left or right, you can use “center” as an option for positioning your shashin tags and widgets. For example:

   [simage=600,576,y,center]

   This gives the picture with key 600 a width of 576, shows the caption, and centers the picture. Shashin uses the CSS “margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;” technique to center the picture. This means you can leave out the “clear” argument if you’re centering, as the subsequent content will be automatically pushed below the picture.

2. The simage tag has a new, optional 6th argument, which lets you specify an alternate thumbnail image. This is particularly useful for videos, as sometimes Picasa is unable to generate a thumbnail (I’ve run into this with a couple of mp4 videos, where the Picasa-generated thumbnail is just a solid black image). You can see it in this post, featuring a video about my son's school in Japan a couple of years ago. The thumbnail is a still frame from the middle of the video. The syntax looks like this:

   [simage=432,288,y,left,none,433]

   The number at the end is the photo key for the thumbnail image to use. Note this option is available only for the simage tag.

These are the bug fixes:

• Fixed incomplete localization code for widget menus
• In the album photo admin menu, now correctly saves whether photos should be included in random display
• The salbumphotos tag can now handle sort order options with spaces (e.g. “pub_date desc”)
• The salbumphotos tag no longer shows a “go back” link, as there’s nothing to go back to