Part of my Camp NaNoWriMo project has been working on this site, so doing a lot of behind the scenes work as well as getting some public pages finally up and sorted.  I have two projects left for that.  The first is a minor change, but will take a bit of work to future-proof it.

The second, was what I was working on yesterday, so I want to take a minute to write about it, because, it’s a story.

So, one area I’d like to include is photo galleries.  I tend to take a lot of pictures (especially of signs) and I do enough interesting things that I have a sizable photo library.  Years ago, on an older version of this site, I uploaded them into galleries, but then I realized that I didn’t want to deal with server space and manually uploading everything.

Enter Picasa.  I was able to upload images to it and quickly and easily create shareable galleries.  Worked great (and I do still like the, no unsupported, desktop client), but eventually Google moved to Google Photos.

Here’s what I’ve found out in the last few days: they didn’t make a Google Photos API, meaning, there was no way for other websites to communicate with Google Photos.  The Picasa API still exists, it just hasn’t been updated in the last two years (and my galleries are still out there, thank goodness).  So while there are plenty of plugins to make image galleries easy for Picasa, all my photos which are now automatically uploaded to Google Photos, had no where to go.

There are workarounds, but it takes quite a bit of know how, and I stumbled my way through about half of it, but I”m still working on getting things how I actually want them to be.

But all of that changed a few weeks ago!  Google released an API for Google Photos and now extensions are being updated and added.  So while I won’t have the galleries up for July, it will still, finally, be a thing!  So look for that sometime soonish, I hope!