Tonight I stumbled upon an interesting post on the CS forums. It raised the question of whether or not one could use Picasa to manage their CS::Galleries photo albums. Dan Bartels of Telligent posted a rather not-helpful response that he had received from Google, basically saying that no such API existed.
I've got quite the collection of photos, and I've long wanted some efficient method to manage them. So, I downloaded Picasa to give it a try. Impressive, and I'll probably stick with it, but it sure would be nice to be able to click a button and update my CS::Galleries with the photos.
A bit of Googling turns up very little on the topic of Picasa "plugins", however. There is a "Plugins" directory, which contains dll's renamed with a tyi extension, but there's ZERO information out there on creating your own.
The closest I can find, or think of, is to create a program to take the XML exports that Picasa can do, and parse them and add/update the photos in CS. This is a completely feasible solution, though I'm not exactly sold on the idea of having to export and then have to start another program to load the images. I'd rather I could just press a button in Picasa and have the photos updated automagically.
Google has released wonderful APIs for most all of their other products. I wonder why Picasa has been overlooked?