Norsk Rikstoto donated the Picture Gallery template to EPiCode some time ago. This very cool template creates thumbnail size, preview size and the possibility to download the full resolution picture. It even handles search in metadata of pictures through the inbuilt search of EPiServer! Norsk Rikstoto use the template in order to provide high resolution pictures to the press and media.

As a side project Sveinung (too shy to have his blog listed on Labs) started working on a hack that would enable us to use Picasa as an image bank. Having seem similar functionality for Picasa to Flickr and Picasa to Facebook we got some new ideas for features.

Yesterday the Picasa2EPiServer module was launched on EPiCode! It enables you to create new picture galleries directly from Picasa by choosing you favorite pictures and publish the to EPiServer. If you want to edit some of the pictures later on you can do that and publish them again to the same gallery (or a new one).

Watch a screencast of the module in use

The module comes with an EPiServer Admin plug-in for installing the button in Picasa and a sample Picture Gallery template. The rest of the fun is up to you.

As the module comes with full source you can easily adopt it into being an image bank for the File manager in EPiServer - having Picasa as your supplier of high quality pictures.