Just-A-View - a free javascript slideshow viewer
Just-a-View is a free JavaScript-based album viewer capable of slideshows, permalinks, and other nifty features. Best of all, it’s ultra-lightweight - Just-a-View runs in only 9KB of script and won’t hog your bandwidth precaching pictures that your users will never see. See it in action »
The current version is version 1.0.
Features
- Permalinking - jump directly to a specific picture
- Slideshow mode
- Lightweight - about 49KB in all, excluding photos
- Automatically resizes photos to the browser window
- Bandwidth friendly
- Cross-browser compatibility
- Integration with Picasa
Download it!
Want to give it a spin? You have some options. Please don’t direct-link the files below; I’d appreciate it if you referred other people to this page instead, where they can have a look at all the other nifty stuff here.
Picasa template (recommended)
This contains everything needed for Just-a-View to run, all neatly packaged as a Picasa web template. Once you download this, copy the entire justaview directory into * PICASA DIRECTORY *\web\templates\ or where applicable. After you restart Picasa, Just-a-View will show up as a Web Page Template under the “Export as HTML Page” menu.
Basic source
If you don’t have Picasa, then you can grab the source code instead. This is for advanced users only, and will require a lot of painful copy-pasting to get working. However, if you want to create a export template for a non-Picasa photo organizer, such as iPhoto or Porta, feel free to do so! We can get in touch and I’ll link you on this site.
Known Issues/FAQ
I opened up the page in my browser, but it just shows a loading bar!
Just-a-View will only work when it’s running off your webspace. For security reasons, scripts like Just-a-View cannot access local files. Upload the files to your webspace and try again.
Alternately, make sure that you’re loading the proper scripts and XML files - sneak a peak at the HTML source to make sure.
There’s a tooltip floating around, even though I’m not hovering over anything!
Hover over the image or a slideshow control, and the offending tooltip should go away. This will be fixed in a future release.
The caption doesn’t show up in the photo tooltip!
Either you don’t have one, or you used a quotation mark ( ” or ‘ ) in the caption. Just-a-View currently does not support quotation marks in the caption for technical reasons. This will also be fixed in a future release; for now, just make do with what you have. 
Something else? Questions? Comments?
Get in touch! Contact me here.