Publish pictures on your site using Flickr

Flickr is a fantastic pictorial resource that allows anyone with a website to integrate images and do much more. We’ll see how to achieve this using RapidWeaver or Wordpress.

Why using Flickr makes sense

With Flickr, you can publish your own pictures but also any of the millions of other images available on the site. Illustrating your stories becomes very easy with such a massive pictorial resource. Even for your own pictures, it makes sense to use Flickr for storage purposes especially if you have limited storage and bandwidth available with your hosting account. Finally, there are tens of useful Flickr web apps that add a lot of fun to the photo experience.

Flickr integration tools on RapidWeaver

Photo album

RapidWeaver’s own photo album style page allows users to create elaborate Flash slideshows using any Flickr photo sets, groups or pools as sources. There are a few cute effects available including the Ken Burns effect, and you can easily add an audio soundtrack. The slideshow appears in a separate page, and there are no options to add text above or below the pictures. There is also no possibility to show photo captions.

RapidFlickr

Another more powerful option for Rapidweaver users is Loghound’s Rapidflickr. Once installed, a new Rapidflickr style page becomes available in RapidWeaver. It features powerful options to select pictures based on tags or photosets, dates, as well as to update the picture selection live to include all the new pictures added on Flickr that match your selection criteria. You can also publish pictures as a photo album in different sizes, with Lightbox effects or as a slideshow. Besides, you can choose to show photo captions and add an introductory text or some descriptions (or even ads) before or below the picture set.

Flickr badge with Blocks

Yourhead software’s Blocks allows you to put a Flickr badge anywhere in the contents of your RapidWeaver site in a snap. The badge requires the Blocks plugin and can be downloaded here. The author also provides a non-Flash version which will work with the iPhone browser (as reported elsewhere the iPhone does not support Flash content). The non-Flash version can be downloaded here.

Flickr integration tools on Wordpress

FlickrRSS

Eightface’s simple FlickrRSS plugin allows you to put any number of Flickr images anywhere in your Wordpress site: just add the simple php code line in the sidebar.php or in your other templates. With this plugin you are not limited to your own pictures, but you can choose any tags or groups and choose the image size. Simple, very elegant yet powerful. You can see it in action in the sidebar or in the iPhone web development page on this site. With a little css knowledge you can already achieve very nice effects. The plugin also allows for the caching of pictures on your server to speed up access, but this functionality seems to be broken now.

FAlbum

RandomByte’s FAlbum is much more powerful and allows the creation of a full image gallery on your Wordpress site, fully integrated with tags, tag clouds, Google-searchable pages, latest pictures in the sidebar, etc. It also reproduces the captions, notes and EXIF data of your pictures. Like FlickrRSS, FAlbum also allows for the caching of the Flickr pictures on your site to speed up access. This is a very powerful tool, but beginners will have a steep learning curve to integrate the generated photo galleries with their Wordpress themes.

Flickr Photo Album

I love Silas’ Flickr Photo Album and you can see it in action on this site: look at our picture gallery. Like FAlbum it allows the creation of a full picture gallery section on your Wordpress site, complete with tags, comments, digging, etc. The standard template tends to integrate better than FAlbum, and it is thus easier to implement on your site. It also comes with a sidebar widget, and the photos are cached.

But where Flickr Photo Album shines is in what you do not see: this plugin allows easy access to all Flickr pictures and albums from within Wordpress’ posting mode. You can search and add Flickr pictures directly in your posts or pages: no more need to upload the picture or to hardlink to it. The plugin does it for you!

Other easy ways to integrate Flickr pictures on Wordpress

The above are the best Flickr integration tools out there, and there are plenty more available: anotherFlickr, Flickr badge for your sidebar, Flickr Related Images (which automatically searches and displays pictures related to your posts), Flickr Spinnr, Photos Flickr, SimpleFlickr, WP-Flickr, etc. Please note that all these plugins may not be fully functional with the latest Wordpress version.

But this short survey would not be complete without mentioning Flickr itself. If you have an account at Flickr, you can add your Wordpress websites in your preferences and you will be allowed to put any picture in your posts directly from within Flickr. This is really great: browse Flickr pictures and post those you like, together with some text and comments, directly on your Wordpress sites. The only limitation is that this technique requires that the picture becomes the story. There is no way to add more than one picture per post, and you need to configure the post style in your preferences.

Tens of other platform-independent Flickr apps

We will be covering many more Flickr web apps in the future, so stay tuned!

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[...] Integrating Flickr pictures on your Wordpress or RapidWeaver site With Flickr, you can publish your own pictures but also any of the millions of other images available on the site. Illustrating your stories become very easy with such a massive pictorial resource. Even for your own pictures, it makes sense to use Flickr for storage purposes especially if you have limited storage and bandwidth available with your hosting account. Finally, there are tens of useful Flickr web apps that add a lot of fun to the photo experience. [...]

[...] a Flickr photo map on your website In our previous Flickr images post we focused on the built-in Flickr functions of RapidWeaver and the various Flickr image integration [...]

[...] you are interested in more Flickr tricks and tips, you may want to check out Integrating Flickr pictures on your Wordpress or RapidWeaver site and Integrating a Flickr photo map on your website. [...]

[...] tools for your your website This is part of my Flickr tools series. I have already looked at how to integrate Flickr with your RapidWeaver or Wordpress site, how to integrate a Flickr photo map on your site and how to quickly create a Flickr badge for your [...]

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