If you follow my blog, then you know that I have frequently changed the way in which I have warehoused and presented the images related to my family history research.

Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, ZenPhoto, and then back to Picasa. I have even attempted to create my own “plugin”, which was basically my impractical attempt at creating a gallery page within this WordPress blog to display these photos and documents. All of these solutions “worked”, all displayed the images, but I was never really satisfied with any of them. They just didn’t look the way I wanted them to look!

About a week ago, I set up a Google Alert for the term “picasa”. I have several Google Alerts to monitor my surnames and periodically find new data this way. I already use Picasa 3 on my hard drive to manage my images.

Fast-forward to yesterday. The Google Alert for “picasa” picked up 10 Cool WordPress Photo Galleries Plugins for WordPress. This alert instantly grabbed my attention! So I navigated to the site and quickly scanned the post. Plugin #5 was “Picasna”…humm, the auther misspelled the term Picasa, or so I thought.

Or maybe not. A trip to the “Picasna” WordPress Plugin page, then to the plugin’s homepage and… a BIG SMILE!

“You can check other Picasaweb plugins, but they all look pretty bad. Most of them just lead your visitors away from your blog to picasaweb service. They show random stuff or require programming skills to set up. Picasna will do everything for you without this headache. It parses link to your picasa album and creates professional fullscreen flash gallery. Don’t waste time choosing a plugin. Go shoot! The best choice for your portfolio, showcase, presentations or photo trip reports.”

WOW, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR!

I scanned to site, read the FAQ’s and checked out the screenshots and I was hooked! But could it really be that easy to install, activate and use? Ok, I’ll give it a try…

After about 5 minutes the plugin was in place on it’s own blog page and I was setting up the individual album links. Copy’n Paste and that was it!

What the Picasna Plugin does is create a snazzy Flash gallery in your post or page, through links to your Picasa Web Albums. A very nice effect indeed! It also works with Flickr.

The Picasna Plugin is simple to install and set-up and creates a beautiful Flash gallery for your genealogy images, all without leaving your WordPress blog. Very impressive!

To see Picasna in action, please visit my Picasna Gallery tab at the top of this page.