Today I enabled the PicasaWeb Public albums channel type.  This will allow you to add images from PicasaWeb Public folders to your frame’s feed.

You can add anyone’s Public folder to your frame as long as you know their PicasaWeb username, usually a GMail email address.  Also, like the Flickr channel type, you can add multiple PicasaWeb channels to you frame so that you can see multiple user’s photos on your frame.

This feature is available immediately to all registered users of the FrameAlbum service.  If you haven’t done so already, you can pre-register for the beta at www.framealbum.com.

As always, if you notice anything wonky with this new channel type, or any part of the FrameAlbum service, please contact me — I can’t fix it if I don’t know it’s broken.

This is starting to get good!

I’ve had a few people ask about this so it seemed worth of a post.  This information only applies to folks who have modified their DNS, or, are using the FrameAlbum DNS service to direct their frames to the FrameAlbum service.  If you are using the custom RSS feed feature of FrameAlbum to get photos onto your frame this does not apply to you.

Every frame that utilized the FrameChannel service has a unique identifier referred to as it’s FrameID.  This ID is included in all requests sent to the service so that the service can identify the specific frame making the request and respond accordingly.  There are several different method of assigning FrameIDs.  For example, Kodak and Toshiba frames use the network MAC address of the frame as it’s ID.

When a new frame connected to the FrameChannel service it displayed an ‘activation code’ that you used to register with the FrameChannel website.  I may do something similar with FrameAlbum in the future but in the name of ‘get something up quickly’ I took a slightly simpler approach.

When your frame requests a feed from FrameAlbum it checks the database to see if that frameID is registered on the service.  If it is not it will generate a slide that includes the frameID used by your frame.  This slide will be shown by your frame.

Once you have your frame’s ID you can add it to your existing FrameAlbum account (or update an existing frame already part of your account) and start adding photo channels to it.

One thing to bear in mind; when you enter your frame’s ID into FrameAlbum it must match exactly the ID displayed on the default panel.  Be careful to include any ‘:’s in your frameID when you add/update your frame on FrameAlbum.