Go Picasa go¶ ↑

Go Picasa go is intended as library written in ruby to manipulate Picasa albums and photos in a easy way. The idea is to provide behaviors to ordinary objects so they can create, retrieve, update and delete albums and photos in a more object oritented way, lefting behind all the HTTP talk that was necessary previouly to interect with this service provided by Google.

This library was implemented based on the Protocol Guide version 2.0 of Picasa Web Albums Data API.

Go Picasa go is still under heavy development but it’s available for testing. We will be glad if you can do some tests and give us your feedback. Thank you.

gem install go-picasa-go

On the command line, run the user_class generator to create a file with the authentication token and other stuff you need:

go-picasa-go user_class YourUserClass google_user_id, google_password

After running the command above, a file called “your_user_class.rb” will be generated at the current folder you’re at. The google user id and google password are only necessary to generate the authentication token for further operations with Go-picasa-go. It’s also important for you to know that the password is only used on this single operation. All other operations executed by the gem uses only the authentication token generated.

user = YourUserClass.new

To create an album:

album = Picasa::DefaultAlbum.new
album.user = user
album.title = "Title"
album.summary = "Summary"
album.location = "Location"
album.keywords = "Keyword, another keyword"
album.access = 'private' # Other options: public, protected

album.picasa_save # Returns true or false
album.picasa_save! # Raise exception in case of not being able to save the album

To update that album:

album.title = "Updating the title"

album.picasa_update # Returns true or false
album.picasa_update! # Raise exception in case of not being able to update the album

To destroy an album:

album.picasa_destroy # Returns true or false
album.picasa_destroy! # Raise exception in case of not being able to destroy the album

To retrieve all albums from an user:

user.albums

To retrieve one specific album

user.find_album album.picasa_id

To create a new photo:

photo = Picasa::DefaultPhoto.new
photo.album = album
photo.description = "Photo summary"
photo.file = File.open 'path/photo.jpg'

photo.picasa_save # Returns true or false
photo.picasa_save! # Raise exception in case of not being able to save the photo

To update an existing photo:

photo.title = "Updating title"
photo.description = "Updating summary"
photo.file = File.open 'path/new_photo.jpg'

photo.picasa_update # Returns true or false
photo.picasa_update! # Raise exception in case of not being able to update the photo

To destroy an existing photo:

photo.picasa_destroy # Returns true or false
photo.picasa_destroy! # Raise exception in case of not being able to delete the photo

To retrieve all photos from an album:

album.photos

To find an specific photo from an album:

album.find_photo photo.id

If you need your own classes to interact to Picasa you can do it like this:

class MyUser
  act_as_picasa_user
  has_many_picasa_albums :class_name => "MyAlbum"

  def picasa_id
    'your_google_user_id'
  end

  def auth_token
    'DQAAAHsAAAAdMyvdNfPg_iTFD-T_u6bBb-9Be...'
  end
end

class MyAlbum
  acts_as_picasa_album
  belongs_to_picasa_user :class_name => "MyUser"
  has_many_picasa_photos :class_name => "MyPhoto"
end

class MyPhoto
  acts_as_picasa_photo
  belongs_to_picasa_album :class_name => "MyAlbum"
end

We provided this kind of configuration so your classes can interact with other frameworks like Rails and inherit from ActiveRecord::Base for example.

In the folder examples/rails-example there’s simple rails application that implements the CRUD of Album and Photo using Go-picasa-go. Enjoy!