I have always been a fan of Google's products, but was not willing to spend the kind of money that most android devices cost. However, Ting changed all that; I was able to get an android phone with a plan I liked at a price I liked.
I have always used Google's online picture storage applications, first PicasaWeb, and more recently Google+. And I have always been bothered by the fact that I was unable to have nested folders in them. I understand that the world is moving away from the folder mentality for base storage, but it still exists as a viewing option in most applications. The desktop application Picasa even offers this feature, but for some reason it was left out of PicasaWeb.
With my android phones auto upload feature for photos I started taking a lot more pictures, and my online picture storage started getting messier and messier. Finally I could not handle it and decided that if Google was not going to fix the issue after five years of people asking, then I would fix it. I have always liked PicasaWeb more than Google+, probably just personal preference, but I decided to write a plugin for PicasaWeb to give me the folders I wanted.
The original Labs project for GMail folders gave me the idea. After a few hours of hacking apart the PicasaWeb HTML interface I had a nice little Chrome extension that worked in the background and turned:
Vacations/2012/Beach
Into the three level folder hierarchy I wanted. Now granted it was not quite perfect, no flash icon or anything like that, but I decided to put it into the Chrome web store for others to have if they wanted. A day later I went to look at it and the lack of images looked horrible, so I went back, added a setting feature to remove the right side bar and create more view-able area for the folders, added an icon and an example image and uploaded the second version.
Now this little tool works great for me and does what I need. Before I started putting a lot of effort into it I figured I would wait and see if others felt the same way. So now I wait, this major missing feature is now available for Chrome users, time will tell just how major others feel the feature is.
Edit (5/2013): I have finally found the time to port this extension over to Google+. The project ended up being more difficult than I had anticipated. Google+ makes it very difficult to modify the pages DOM, so I ended up having to actually replace all the album objects with my own custom version. The port is pretty good for a first version. The biggest complaint I have is that sometimes the javascript navigation that Google+ uses doesn't trigger it to run. But it works for now.
Edit2 (5/2016): I, once again, have found the time to port this extension to Google's newest photo product Google Photos. You can download the newest version here. For those of you who have a really large number of albums, like myself, the plugin will scroll to the bottom of the list of albums, wait 2 seconds, then scroll to the bottom again. It will repeat this process until all your albums have been loaded; otherwise you would have missing albums on the page. You can adjust the delay time in the plugin settings.
A collection of problems and discoveries usually related to the tech industry in some way.
9 comments:
Hi Jereme. Thanks for building this. I've installed the Chrome extension, but still can't work out how to use it. Do you have a step by step guide? Thanks, John.
1. Install the extension.
2. Navigate to picasaweb.google.com.
3. Click on the My Photos tab. The extension is only active for that tab.
4. Make sure that your albums are named with the "Folder/Folder/Album" convention using "/" as the separator. The extension will convert that into the appropriate directories.
Thanks Jereme. Will give it a go.
It figures that shortly after I wrote this Google is now starting the process of turning off PicasaWeb.
Perhaps some day I will have some free time and motivation and update this to work with Google+.
Does this mean that the extension will not work for the plus.google.com/photos redirect from picasweb.google.com?
Well for a short while there I had it ported over to Google+, so yes it did work.
However in the last few weeks Google rewrote Google+ again which has broken the extension.
At some point I will find time to go in and fix it once again.
I wanted to try this out but I needed to do alot of things: install chrome, install your app, join google+. Did all that and I now see my Picasa photos on google+ but I haven't a clue as to how your app is supposed to work. I know I paid nothing for your app or for app support but could you give me a clue as to how to make it work?
Thanks for the coding - Jim
When you name your albums (or rename them) in Google+ make sure you use "/" as part of the name.
For example, if you went to the fair this year you might name your album: "Family/Fair" (without the quotes), then if you had some relatives over for dinner you might make a separate album and name it "Family/Relatives".
When you navigate in Chrome to Google+, then Photos, then Albums, those two albums should be replaced with a single image titled "Family(s)", click on that image and your two albums should be displayed for selection.
Currently the biggest issue I have found is that after navigating into an album if I navigate back to the Google+ Albums tab clicking on the albums is broken, I have to refresh the page to make it work again.
I just recently re-updated this plugin for Google Photos, for those of you who wish to give it another try.
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