If you haven't tried Google's Picasa 2 yet for managing your photos, its very cool and FREE! In addition to its photo management capabilities, like MindManager, It has an Export as Web Page feature that lets you quickly create web pages of your pictures. One of the options in the export is to save a folder of pictures as XML Code. Using this option you can transform the XML code into a MindManager X5 Pro Map.
I have made a simple macro and map template that can be run in MindManager X5 Pro that transforms the XML into a map with thumbnails and links to the images:. To use this macro do the following:
- Download the friee trail of MindManager X5 Pro
- Unzip the macro and template into any folder on your system
- Start Picasa 2 and Export a folder as Web Pages, selecting XML Code as the export type
- Start MindManager X5 Pro
- Select Tools...Macros...Macros from the Top-Level Menu
- Press Add and fill in the form to point to the macro and press OK
- From the File menu select Open Picasa 2 XML
- Select the xml file exported from step 2
In MindManager, there are a few ways to accomplish this, and I chose the least sophisticated method. Here are the methods can be used in MindManager to do this:
- Macro: I chose to write a macro that uses a DOM Document to iterate through the .xml. This is the simplest method that I know.
- Inbound Transformation: I did not choose this method because there was no way of knowing the full path of the inbound xml file so I could not get the thumbnail and image files.
- XSLT transformed by a Macro: I could do this using an extension object in XSLT to create the image Base64 streams but that would take twice as long to transform the xml.
- Import Filter: This requires a compiled language (C#, C++, VB) and I wanted to make a simple sample.
1/28/2005