Archive for October, 2008

Picasa Microsoft ICE Button

Posted in Uncategorized on October 11th, 2008 by Ola Lindberg – 2 Comments

I have been playing around with Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) some days and it’s really great for stitching several images to a panorama! The only thing missing is a way to open images in ICE from Picasa without needing to locate them in Explorer.

I created a button that you can add to Picasa that opens the selected images in ICE. It’s available for automatic installation or manual installation. If you choose manual installation copy the file to <your user folder>\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\buttons. If you want to remove it from Picasa you can delete the file from that directory. The pbz file contains two zipped files; one XML-file and one icon file. See Picasa Button API for more information about Picasa Buttons.

Prerequisites:

  • Picasa Installed. I used the version 3 beta.
  • Microsoft ICE installed. Note! It must be installed to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor

Issues / TODOs:

  • There are a hard coded path for the ICE executable. I tried to find a registry key for ICE but I found none so you must install Microsoft ICE to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor
  • The icon and text on the button doesn’t look quite alright. It works but looks a bit lame.
  • Try to send a path where ICE should save the stitched image so it defaults to the same location as the unstitched.

I’ll try to fix the above issues. See my post in ICEs forum.

If you are using Flickr you might also want to check out picasa2flickr and if your are using Gimp the Gimp Picasa Button!