I learned something about Flickr last night. Grrrrrr … it took a lot of debugging, but I did finally figure it out in spite of their documentation.
For those who do not know, Flickr is a web site where you can upload your photos and they’ll be available for other folks to view. Visitors to the AirJaldi Summit in Dharamsala, India, have been posting their photos to Flickr, and I needed a way to show those photos on the AirJaldi Resources site…
There are two methods of showing Flickr photo sets on your web site. The first is to embed some code that reads RSS feeds from Flickr and then shows the “n” most recent photos you’ve added to your account. A group called Eightface has a plug-in for WordPress that allows you to pick up the most recent photos from your Flickr account. But, that wasn’t for me because I needed access to a rather large number of photos, and this plug-in only allows access to as many as 10 recent photos. Too limited for me.
The second approach, which did work well for me, was to insert some code in my web page that embeds a Flickr slideshow constructed from the photos in my account. It uses what’s called an inline frame, and this makes it possible to drop the contents of an external web site into a page on your own web site. Paul Stamatiou has a page that describes how this is done, though I beat my head against a “bug” in the code that caused me no end of grief (honestly the bug is probably Flickr’s fault, but I had to modify Paul’s code to make things work). The slideshow require the Flash plug-in, version 7 or later, as we discovered when a friend tried to make it work (unsuccessfully) with Flash 6.5 on Win-XP.
First, here’s what the code does (see box below where my slideshow is running).
</p> <p>The “bug” in the code is that if you’re going to select from your own account and want to select only a certain tag, you have to use ‘tags’ and ‘tag_mode=all’ rather than just ‘tags’ – otherwise it selects all photos from all Flickr users that used that tag. Odd behavior. Only if you use ‘tag_mode’ does it select only from your photos.</p> <p>Anyway, I love the result, which is a neat professional slideshow of my photos.</p> <p>And here’s the code that embeds this frame (sorry, because of the way WordPress works I had to use “{” and “}” instead of “<” and “>” but you’ll get the idea):</p> <p>{iframe align=center xsrc=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?nsid=67871323@N00&user_id=67871323@N00&tags=airjaldi&tag_mode=all frameBorder=0 width=500 scrolling=no height=500}{/iframe}</p> <p>Notice that I have added the ‘tag_mode=all’. That’s what it takes to make it work correctly and show only <i>my</i> photos.</p>
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