I used Flickr for a long time, but found it way overkill for what I want in a photo gallery. My needs for online photo sharing are simple: I want to be able to put a bunch of my photos in a named album, easily integrate those photos here on braimee.com, and I want the tool to be free.

About a year ago I started hosting my photos with Picasa, a Google service. And it did exactly what I needed without a lot of extra bells and whistles I didn’t care about. My only struggle was finding a decent Wordpress plugin that would help me suck my Picasa galleries into this blog. The plugins I found during my search only allowed you to integrate some thumbnails into a sidebar widget, but I wanted a plugin to allow full gallery integration into a Wordpress page.

Enter the Shashin plugin (with a side order of Highslide) to save the day! Together these plugins sync with my Picasa gallery, and give nifty “pop out zoom” magic when you click on a picture within a gallery. It’s tough to describe, but head to our photos page to see it for yourself. Let me know what you think.