High-temperature annealing and pre-annealing lift-off procedures are employed to improve the solution processible technique for the fabrication of one- (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) metallic photonic crystals (MPCs) based on colloidal gold nanoparticles. This enables the successful fabrication of gold nanowires or nanocylinder array structures with the photoresist template removed completely, which is crucial for the application of MPCs in biosensors and optoelectronic devices. Microscopic measurements show homogeneous 1D and 2D photonic structures with an area as large as 100 mm2. Plasmonic resonance of the gold nanostructures and its coupling with the resonance mode of the planar waveguide underneath the photonic structures are observed, implying the excellent optical properties of this kind of MPCs based on the improved fabrication technique.