Shanghai Tech Writer

Picasa is a great photo organizer application, but what happens after you upload photos from your camera to Picasa? I’ve been searching and looking for a good way to share photos with family/friends as well as displaying them on my websites/blogs. Personally, I don’t like Flickr because Flickr doesn’t always work in China, but also, the photos load relatively slow. I also want the flexibility of hosting and displaying the photos the way I want on my websites.

As mentioned in the previous post, I recently discovered 19 free Picasa templates! I installed all the templates and generated a demo web album for each template. I will be reviewing all the templates in a series of post.

The following is a list of criteria I am looking for as I’m reviewing the templates.

1. Design. Initial impression. Does the template look “slick” and “cool”? Is it simple or too “busy”?
2. Loading speed. How long does it take to load the template? Do all the images load initially or one at a time as you view them? Is it fast to go from one image to the next?
3. Number of clicks. How much clicking do you have to do to view the images? The less clicking, the better. Thumbnail views are great, but some require you to click each image twice, once to view full-size and again to close.
4. Browsing efficiency. Ability to navigate through the images without having to view every single one.
5. Image size. The bigger the image, the better. People like viewing images as close to fullscreen as possible.
6. Captions. Captions are good because they explain the images. However, caption location, font style, font color, and font size can affect overall design.
7. Customizable. Can you customize the template? Can you change the background color, image view size, and captions placement/formatting)?
8. Embed in blogs. Can you embed the template into a blog post? 
9. Browser-friendly. Does the template work on all browsers. You have to assume most of your viewers are using either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox.
10. Downloadable images. Can people download images from this template? For friends and family, you don’t have to send them emails with huge attachments anymore. They can download the images they want to keep. However, not everyone wants their images to be downloadable, so no score will be given for this criteria.

For each template, I will write a review and give a score for each criteria (except for the last criteria). I will include a demo album generated by each template (screenshots, embedded album, and fullscreen album) and give an overall score.

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