Polaroid Style Thumbnails
I’ve had several folks ask me how I do the ’tilted’ Polaroid effect on my image thumbnails, including a popup for the larger version.
Until today the answer was somewhat complicated: “using some tools and scripts I wrote that run manually on the server”.
I exchanged some email on Friday with an old friend Greg Friedman - who is the Development Manager for several Windows Live products and who has Windows Live Writer under his command. He inadvertently prompted me to think about using Live Writer for editing.
Live Writer is a very cool WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that allows people to author blog posts seeing them in the style of their site. I use WordPress as my blog platform - which I love - but often the editor and the ‘published’ view differ quite a lot.
Last night, I downloaded the Live Writer SDK and hacked up a plugin that allows me to compose Polaroid images on the fly.
To get the ‘popup’ style, I added the Thumbnail Viewer WordPress plugin. With this technique any images that are marked with rel=”thumbnail”, get automatically lightboxed. My Live Writer Plugin sets this attribute for you, so you don’t have to do a thing. It also generates an 800×600 sized image to go in the lightbox automatically. So you can shoot big photos, and publish them in seconds.
If you use WordPress and are interested in trying this out, do the following:
1. Download and install the WordPress Thumbnail Viewer.
2. Download and install Windows Live Writer.
3. Download and install my Polaroid Plugin from the Live Writer Gallery.
4. Run Live Writer, and there should now be an “Insert Polaroid” option.
Oh… and I made a few upgrades while I was at it - a new drop-shadow effect, and also the option to put a caption on the Polaroid.
I’m sure there are bugs - so if anyone uses it let me know and I’ll fix ‘em.
OK - enough geeking out - I did promise myself I’d try not to post any tech-related articles and so far I’m doing pretty good.
11 Responses to “Polaroid Style Thumbnails”
November 7th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Great idea, I just want to check one thing. Did you mean rel=”thubmnail” or rel=”thumbnail”? Thanks!
November 7th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
oops
good catch. i fixed. i never was very good a speeling 
December 20th, 2007 at 8:38 am
[...] You can learn more about this great plugin from the author’s website: http://www.brettonstuff.com/index.php/tech/polaroid-style-thumbnails [...]
January 31st, 2008 at 8:46 am
I just found Live Writer, and shortly after that I found your plugin. Exactly what I wanted, thank you very much! One annoyance is that I want the default size to be my customized version of “small” but if I change the settings for “small” images are inserted by default as Custom with a size of 275px. Would be nice if I could set the default to use and have it maintained. But it’s not too much work to change for each picture. Thanks again!
March 4th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Hi, I recently started using Windows Live Writer for publishing my blog and I have found your plugin as one of the most useful and best plugins available. It really helps provide the blog that wel-designed feel without worrying about the details.
Thanks and keep up the good work
March 9th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
hi, great plugin! by the way, is it possible to use “insert polaroid” but the picture is not on your local hard drive but on flickr? how do you do it? thanks a bunch!
March 9th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Lazy Goy,
You can sort-of do this. Copy the URL to the image from flickr onto your clipboard, then when you insert a polaroid - when the File-Open dialog comes up - just paste in the URL instead of picking a file. Polaroid Picture will download this photo and use it.
Fwiw - it will end up re-reposting the image to your blog site, which might not be quite what you are asking for - but it’s a start
thx,
-brett
March 20th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
I just upgraded to the very latest version, posted March 20th.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work!
“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”
March 21st, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Looks like the issue Karl reports might be a Live Writer issue with the latest release of Writer. See this post for more details.
June 15th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
[...] Jump to Comments I’m fooling around with a new Windows Live Writer plugin that lets me post images with a Polaroid scrapbook-style look. What a great time to inundate [...]
June 26th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
When you use the red corners and tilt the image, occasionally the text goes wonky. It looks like a coloured bleeding of the letters.