aaron c beals

photos.
i use Picasa to manage my personal (not professional) digital photos, and it works pretty well. great interface, excellent protection of the original images, great built-in backup, superb image filters for a free software package. it even does IPTC keyword tagging.

the only downside was that it published to Picasa Web Albums (PWA). not that there’s anything wrong with the Web Albums, but i (and most of my friends) use Facebook. the Facebook albums do have their downside (limited to 60 images, no real “export” functionality), but benefits as well (entity tagging, easy comments, images and comments built into Facebook news feed, no apparent storage limit compared to the 1GB for PWA). i argue the benefits outweigh the costs.

after poking around a bit, i found a Facebook / Picasa plugin that gives me exactly what i’m looking for. on the Picasa side, a simple XML plugin adds a button to Picasa that uploads to Facebook. i can edit and make comments on the photos in Picasa, and then hit the upload button. Picasa then uploads the photos to my account in Facebook, including the comments. the Facebook side of the plugin allows you to create new albums and add photos to existing albums.

the only downside to the plugin is the security of the script called by Picasa. essentially, it has to send a request through a script running on the plugin author’s PC. the Facebook login information is passed by his script directly on to Facebook, but you have to trust him. it’s unfortunate, but he’s been open about the risk and claims he isn’t malicious (too bad he doesn’t open the source or i’d just host the script on my own website). i’m willing to take the risk for now because the benefit is greater.

as a result, though, you’ll see fewer photos posted here on my website and more posted on Facebook.

website posts
another crossover point between Facebook and my website are the posts. Facebook has a notion of “notes”, which are like blog posts, but i didn’t see the sense in using the notes when i had a website already. but who actually read my website, anyhow? everyone spends all their time on Facebook now.

so luckily, the developers at Facebook built an extension to the notes that allow you to import from a single RSS feed… in this case, my website. it grabbed my last 10 posts and in the future will update automatically with each new post. problem solved.