Picasa v Flickr

I’ve been umming and arring over whether to use Flickr or Picasa for my photo storage. Pros for Flickr are it has better album/set support and allows photo titles. Pros for Picasa are it’s easier to upload stuff from the PC, has more free storage and the Shashin plugin for WordPress is excellent.

The lack of titles was the main problem I was facing but a quick edit of the ShashinPhoto.php file in the plugin and I now have titles as captions under the thumbnails in the album views. This allows me to have the full caption when the user clicks on the image to see the full version.

Basically all I’ve done is added a new title variable which takes a substring of the caption up to the first occurrence of a newline character. So to add a title to a photo in Picasa I just add it at the beginning of the caption followed by a newline. I can even not have a title if I don’t want to by not including a newline character anywhere in the caption.

If anyone finds this and would like to do it (and so I remember how I did it!) all you need do is edit ShashinPhoto.php in the shashin plugin folder and add the following two lines before line 680

$title = $this->data['description'];
$title = substr($title,0,strpos($title,10));

Edit line 684 to

$opt_caption = $title;

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John Talbot

The main protagonist behind this nonsense. The website title is inspired by the lyrics of the B-side to Lily the Pink by The Scaffold. "The buttons of your mind were difficult to find and my fingers far too clumsy."