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Slide.Show is an open source Silverlight 1.0 control. You can use it for publishing very customizable photo slideshows on the Web. It was initially created by Vertigo but it is now hosted as a project on CodePlex.

Although it is highly customizable it does not provide a way to add photos easily. Manually editing an XML file is not for everyone. There are tools available like the "Data & Image Generator for Slide.Show". But this still has the problem that it you have to add a collection of photos.

In the past I figured out how the whole templating stuff in Picasa works and worked on the Picasa templates for SimpleViewer and PostcardViewer. So I thought wouldn't it be nice to have an option "export as webpage" that would generate the "data.xml" file for Slide.Show.

The Picasa plugin generates not only the "data.xml" file but a full Slide.Show slideshow. It is only a sample slideshow and you can use it as it is or customize it however you want. The main goal of this plugin was to provide an easy way to generate the  "data.xml" file from the place where I manage my photos. You can donwload the plugin here.

Yesterday Hetty -my girlfriend- wanted to post some gardenlife photos to our website. She used Picasa to generate the webpages and asked me to put them online. I clicked on the page to view the photos. The photos came up nicely but when I tried to navigate it was a no-go.

In the first version of the SimpleViewer Picasa template there were some "annoyances". Herman a friend and colleague complained that he couldn't generate a website. So I started digging, found the cause and found some other issues. The result was an improved version of the template.

Last week I received some questions from Dane Howard who is speaking at Flash Forward. His session is about how to combine Flash with XML to deliver animated templates. He asked for information on the Picasa export functionality.

For me it was a while ago I did something with the template internals. So after digging into the Picasa template stuff I could answerd his question. But most importantly I noticed an unfinished side project: the PostcardViewer template for Picasa.

PostcardViewer is another product of AirtightInteractive. Same principle but a different look.

Untill yesterday it was kind of hidden on the AirtightInteractive website. After re-discovering the template I decided to finish the project. There were two reasons for this: I don't like loose ends and I wanted to use the template for a portrait gallery.

Felix the author of the PostcardViewer even created the instructions on how to use the Postcard Picasa template.

Every time we come back from a vacation I want to get my photos online. Up until now it was a pain. Resizing the photos, setting up the navigation, reinventing the wheel because you didn't like the way it was set up the last time etc. etc.

This time it was different, after sorting the photos it took about 15 minutes to generate the website. What a relief!

I guess it's like a lot of things you just have to use the right tools:

• Picasa, for basic editing and organising your photos
• SimpleViewer Picasa Template, to generate the website

Picasa also includes some website templates but not as good looking as the SimpleViewer template.