KevinHarder.com

A few weeks ago Andrew Duthie modified the default Graffiti theme by adding in the Slide.Show Silverlight photo gallery control, with a hand written configuration and data xml files, and shared it with the Graffiti team at Telligent. I had not seen the Slide.Show control before and it looked amazing! Especially for being free and relatively new.

Slide.Show was developed by Vertigo Software as a demonstration of Silverlight's power and flexibility. It was then released as an open source project on CodePlex. It consists of a few javascript files that retrieve the album and photo data via XML, JSON, or a built-in Flickr provider and renders the Silverlight.

I thought it would make a great Graffiti plugin. The plugin can render the necessary javascript and dynamically create the configuration and data xml files so you don't have to modify your theme or manually create any xml files. I also found an additional Slide.Show data provider javascript that allows it to retrieve photos from Google Picasa Web Album which was written by Wesley Riley.

So I built three very similar plugins that use the Slide.Show control to display a photo gallery on a post page. The difference between them is in where they get the photos from:

• Slide.Show Photo Gallery Plugin - This plugin looks for photos on the web server. Create a folder to be the "root" of the photo gallery and enter that in the plugin configuration. Inside of this root folder, create subfolders for each album. Put the image files that go in each album in the respective album folder. You can optionally create a plain text file called "album.txt" inside each album folder that contains the album description.
• Flickr Slide.Show Photo Gallery Plugin - This plugin uses the Flickr API to retrieve photos from a user account on Flickr. Flickr sets are displayed as albums in the gallery. This is currently running on this site.
• Picasa Slide.Show Photo Gallery Plugin - This plugin uses the Picasa API to retrieve photos from a user account on Google Picasa Web Albums. Albums in Picasa are displayed as albums in the gallery.

You can now download a beta version of these plugins now on the download page. You need to have Silverlight 1.0 installed to view the gallery.

If you try out one of these plugins, please send me feedback about any issues you run into and suggested improvements. You can use the contact form on this site or email me at kevin _at_ kevinharder.com. Once they get tested a little more I'll make any needed changes and re-release it, along with the full source code.

Disclaimer: They are being released as a beta because I have not had time to fully test every combination of the options. Also, I have seen one instance where the Picasa plugin would not download pictures from the Picasa API for some reason, but then worked after a refresh. I had started working on a feature to automatically generate thumbnail images when using the folder version of the plugin, but removed it from this version as I need to get more info about what sizes Slide.Show uses. Use these plugins at your own risk.