All-in-one solution for Picasa, YouTube, Twitpic, Pinterest

There are a lot of plugins to manage galleries of images and videos out there, and the most popular is probably NextGEN. But if you’re running a site hosted on a service with little traffic and/or disk space, and have all sorts of images and videos to show, the best way is to host all your media externally — and then integrate them inside your own website.

This is where Shashin excels. It links to your albums on Picasa and/or your channel on YouTube, and allows you to use shortcodes and similar tools (like NextGEN, even though it’s not so sophisticated) to automatically embed images and videos in your pages, articles, or even on widgets.

A key feature is keeping everything in sync. As soon as you upload a video on YouTube, for instance, you can refresh the sync with Shashin, and all your pages displaying YouTube videos — either all of them, or a widget on the sidebar with the “last video”— will automatically be changed as well.

Shashin also includes the usual lightbox and slideshow tools, and uses a lot of Javascript to display the thumbnails. If there is anything I can find a fault with Shashin is that it might be “too much Javascript” — sometimes, pages fail to load completely, specially if you are using the good practice of loading JS asynchronously. The good news is that Shashin will default to pointing directly to your Picasa/Google+/YouTube albums if the whole Javascript hasn’t loaded yet — you lose the “integration”, but at least you’re able to show the images and videos to your viewers.