With the improvement’s that have been made to digital cameras and cell phones, and today’s lifestyle, more and more people are taking digital photos. A growing number of people store those photos in Google Plus photo albums. This is a great option for some, as it’s free and in the cloud. You can even share your photos with the world, or with specific people only. Sharing one or two photos is simple no matter where you keep your photos. But what if you want to share a bunch of photos on your blog?
You could upload all of the photos into WordPress and create a slideshow there, but now you’re putting the photos in a second place and possibly creating a situation that will really slow your blog’s load time down.
You could also use a WordPress plugin. I have had many plugin issues in the past, because they can be a real resource hog and because they aren’t always updated. I have actually been advised to avoid adding plugins whenever possible, so adding a plugin is the last recommendation I’d ever make to you.
Or, you could use Picasa web albums. Some people remember Picasa web albums from back in the day before Google Plus came out. Well, it’s still alive and kicking. And it offers the option to share a photo album as an embedded slideshow. Here’s how you do it.
Visit https://picasaweb.google.com/home.
This tutorial presumes that you’ve already added your photos to Google Photos / Google Plus. If you haven’t uploaded your photos yet, or if you wish to add more, you can still do that here first by clicking the upload button.
Click on the album that you want to make a slideshow of to open that album. You should see something like this.
On the right side of the album you’ll see the panel with sharing options.
Click where it says link to this album.
Click where it says embed slideshow.
A new small window will open that looks something like this.
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Configure your slideshow to suit your blog. You can choose from five widths:
- Small 144 px
- Medium 288 px
- Large 400 px
- Extra Large 600 px
- Extra-extra large 800 px
You can also choose if you want the captions to be displayed while the slideshow is playing, and if you want the slideshow to autoplay.
Code will appear in the yellow box. If you click on the yellow box it should copy the code to your clipboard. Paste that code into your blog (in code view, not visual).
That’s it! Now you’ll have a slideshow of your photos when you publish. It’ll look something like this.
There will be some super grateful people out there after reading this. When I first started blogging, embedding was so hard for me!
I didn’t know how to do this on my blog! Thanks for sharing this information! Hope you have a great weekend!
You know, I have always had trouble with embedding. I finally get it, but it took quite a few tutorials for me to get the hang of it.
Thanks for the great information. I am excited to try it for myself.
That’s a great tutorial. There’s so much involved in making a blog run, and so much to know. This will make it a snap!
I’m sure this is very helpful to a lot of people! Thanks so much for the great tips and advice!
I love this. I am bookmarking it so I can use it .
What a great tutorial! I think new and older bloggers alike will benefit from this!
Thanks for the heads up! I keep debating switching from blogger to wordpress, and this is pretty cool!
I did not know that you can do this! I don’t still fully “get” Google Plus so I don’t use it that often but I am wanting to learn.
On my site and an occasional book mostly.
What great info! I had no idea about this, so now I know and can take advantage! Very cool!
I remember Picasa. I am pretty sure there are photos in my account that I have long forgotten about, much like my multiple PhotoBuckets to hold my photos and graphics I used for the big MySpace days. These days I house my photos at Shutterfly and Flickr.
What a handy tool. I need to use this on my wordpress website for a different website that I manage.
Great tutorial! You did a good job of explaining exactly now to do this.
Thanks for the awesome tutorial – I usuall share photos with friends and family via Dropbox, but this will be great if I need to post to my blog!
This looks easy enough! Slideshows have always slowed my site down, this looks like a great alternative!
Good post – when I first started blogging I searched the web for post just like this.
Definitely a great break down! I love being able to share multiple photos!
Aww this is perfect, I was trying to figure this out a few weeks ago.
What a great way to get readers to visit your Google+ page too. Thanks for taking the time to share.
This is a great tutorial! You explained it so well and I can’t wait to try it out.
This is great. I wish I could find one of these for blogger platform. I wanted to make a slideshow, but I can’t figure out how to do it for the life of me.
Thanks for making this so easy, I’ll be adding to my board!