Entry with a slide show style of set of pictures

In my last blogging post, I  showed you how to add a video to your blogger blog.

In this post, I want to show you how to put a slide show up.

The reasons for choosing a slide show vary.  The biggest, in my opinion, is to conserve real estate in the blog. It also minimizes the amount of scrolling necessary to read the blog.

I mentioned in my earlier blogging posts, I mentioned that there are several outside utilities used for blogging.  I also mentioned that I would only show the tools within Blogger.  This post will be an exception to that.  This is because without an external "tool" if you will, you can not earmark a set of pictures as a slide show.

There are many photo services that allow you to embed into your blogs and web pages slide shows.  The one I will demonstrate this time is Picasa Web.

Picasa Web is another one of Google's subsidiaries.  It is the online album storage of the desktop photo management tool Picasa.

I will describe how to use only the web application, because this does not require the installation of the desktop application.

If enough people request it, I will do a more full review of the Picasa desktop application, with pros and cons associated.

That being said, let's get to it.

Of course in order to use Picasa Web, you'll have to create an account.  Since you had to create an account for Blogger, this should be an easy thing for you, and I'll just assume you can get to that point with out more input from me.

Once you've got your account, you should be in the Albums page that looks something like this:

You'll want to click on the new album button ( ) just above the place where your albums will be listed when you've got some.

This dialogue will appear:

Now, you'll notice that you can store some interesting information with your album.  You can choose to fill out as little or as much as you'd like.

I'll only point out 2 particular fields of interest. The title, at the top, and "Public" or "Unlisted" down at the bottom.

The title is important, because it will appear with your slide show.  So you'll want to pick something easily recognized and understood.

The choice between Public & Unlisted is also something you'll want to make note.  If you choose not to have your album be public, you'll still be able to display your pictures in a slide show on other sites. Setting an album to a public allows it to be searched and viewed via different search engines and people who happen by your albums.

You can also choose to upload photos into an additional folder, if you've already got one, but be aware that any existing photos in that album will be part of the slide show.

Once you create the album you'll come to this screen:

 

From there you'll click on the "Upload Photos" link on the left and you'll see this dialogue:

It will allow you to upload 5 photos at a time.  Which is a decent number of pictures at a time depending on the size of your pictures.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, you'll wan to make sure the size of the pictures is web appropriate.  Remember this is a considerably lower resolution than print, so a given picture should stay in the 250kb range for the even the largest of pictures.

Once you've uploaded your photos, back at the photo album page, you'll see new link on the left side, "Embed Slideshow"

Once you click on Embed Slideshow, you'll see this dialogue:

Here it will help you generate the HTML code needed to embed a Picasa slide show in any web page that you have hosted.  Where your blog is concerned, you'll begin entering the post and switch to HTML view. Then you'll paste the generated code where you want it to appear in your blog.  For example:

<h1>The Greatest Slideshow Ever</h1>

Shades of Me:<br/>

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="400" height="267" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fwongcienzo%2Falbumid%2F5134793865116909729%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D4tfOxdnvDQc" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>

Would produce this when pasted properly into a web page or blog entry:

The Greatest Slideshow Ever

Shades of Me:

So, that concludes my blog posting basics series.  You should be able to publish just about any kind of blog you'd like.  If you have any questions or tool review/explanation requests, feel free to comment and I'll do my best to accommodate.