Using Flickr to show images on WordPress
I have been playing with the idea of letting Flickr hold the images I post to this site. While I am not too comfortable having the images on a third party server, they do have some amazing features, and let’s not forget the enormous user base.
For the past couple of weeks I have really started to get into the Flickr way of things. I resisted for years, but I finally cracked and gave it a fair shot — and I love it. You probably knew all this before I did, but there is one thing Flickr does that makes me doubt having my pictures on their servers. It is the fact that if you do not have a pro account, only your last 200 pictures will be visible in your photo-stream.
I get that there should be benefits of having a pro account, and there are lots of them; statistics, unlimited upload, HD video and other goodies. The thing that worries me about limiting visible photos is that they are in fact messing with my content and not just the extra features.
I do of course have all master images on my own computer, and all images posted to either Flickr or my website are only low resolution versions, so I will never really “lose” any pictures in that regard. It is still a matter of consistency and uniformity on the website, and having external sources control the content is perhaps not always a good idea.
To get a feel for how it all will look, I have attached a set with images from a previous post called Skansen using the Flickr gallery embed feature.
Zen Photo – the zen of photo albums
There are lots of great online photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Zooomr, but it is kind of nice to have the pictures on one’s own server. In the past I have been using Gallery 2, Coppermine and other types of galleries. They are all very competent but lacks one essential thing – simplicity, while being elegant at the same time. This is where Zen Photo comes in.
Zen photo is very simple, stylish and fresh, but it still has all features that one would ever need. Support for themes, comments, spam fighting, RSS feeds and other things are of course supported. There are also plugins available for integration with WordPress, which we all love.
There is one thing that needs to be done though, and that is to somehow make it easy to upload images from the mobile phone to the site. The fastest way would probably be to email everyting to an account and use a script to fetch all images and add them to the site. I will definitely look into that.
Visit my gallery at gallery.chadda.se for a real life demonstration.