Plugin Page
Flickr Photo Album
Description
The WordPress Flickr Photo Album plugin will pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site.
Features
- Display your Flickr photo sets as albums on your site
- Search engine friendly URLs
- Complete control over the look and feel, see below for customization details
- Show or hide your photos that have been marked ‘private’
- Flickr notes (Firefox only) and Flickr comments are supported
- Adds a new Photos tab for you to easily add Flickr photos to any blog post
- The new Photos tab allows you to filter your photos by tags, or to search everyone’s photos by tags
- Supports WordPress Widgets: Pull in your recent photos into your sidebar.
Review
Ever since I signed up for a Flickr Pro account, I’ve been wanting to integrate my Flickr albums into my blog. I tried quite a few Flickr plugins. Some worked but not to my satisfaction, while others gave errors. I was recommended to this plugin by one of my readers, but had kept putting it off until today.
You can see that I am impressed considering I’ve chosen to review it immediately.
To begin the review, the installation process is straight forward but has several steps. Besides activating the plugin, you have to chmod the cache folder and then you need to create a Flickr API key and feed this to the plugin. You then have to authorize your blog at Flickr, so that you can read the images.
Once you finish this, you can choose the url you want the photos to be displayed at. I chose /photos/ which was kinda obvious and the photos started displaying instantly.
You can customize the photos page still further by adding a template page in your themes directory. I haven’t gotten down to this yet.
The photos page displays your latest album and also shows your older album. You can choose to customize the order of the albums as well. You continue to manage your photos at Flickr and the plugin will automatically fetch the new photos and albums. One good feature here is that the photos are cached so as to reduce the continues calls to Flickr.
You can also choose to display the photos in your sidebar if you have the WordPress widgets plugin. I don’t use it, so would be good to know how I can do this manually.
Besides displaying the photos, the plugin adds a new photos tab that lets you insert these photos while composing your posts.
The last good feature is the ability to display / hide private posts.
Things I would like to see implemented is the the new collections feature of Flickr, as well the ability to independently organize the photo albums into collections on the blog.
Are you using this plugin? What would you like to see?
I love this plugin. I tried one of the more popular ones out there, and hit nothing but problems.
Joe (the author) is great with fixing bugs quickly and putting out quality releases.
Some features I’d like to see would include:
• Collection support (I don’t have any collections right now, but it would be nice)
• The ability to have the WordPress widget randomly pick from all of your photos…not just the latest in your photostream.
• Automatic refreshing, maybe based on WordPress’s built-in cron. As of now, you’ve got to either press the “Refresh Photos” button in your gallery, or visit the WP-Admin page for the Flickr Photo Gallery.
• Comment support would be really cool. I’d like my gallery to display Flickr comments where appropriate, and allow people to submit Flickr comments on my photo page. I don’t know if this is even possible.
• Somehow sync hits between my Flickr photostream and the gallery (preferably at Flickr).
As for enabling the widget without using WordPress Widgets, sorry…I tried looking for that when I ran K2 (as it has it’s own system for widgets), but couldn’t figure it out.
Comments would be nice, and very possible. The Flickr API does have a set of commands for fetching and creating comments from outside of the Flickr site.
Amazing plug-in. My second favorite right after Akismet.
I have this plugin installed too!
I’ve had a bit of trouble adding my sidebar content to the unique theme page I created for the photos. It’s been a few months since I last tried to fix it. I’m sure there’s help out there for me yet, however that aspect of the setup seemed more difficult than any other part.
this is probably my favorite plugin.
two things i would change:
1. make the asynchronous loading of the sidebar widget work! my page hangs when it is loading that widget.
2. make it easy to insert images into posts using lightbox. currently you either have to change the code yourself to add the lightbox attribute, or edit your post html by hand
I think this will do the work for me as well.. I have also noticed this plugin lately on your blog as well!!! Let me try this out!
have already installed this plugins on my blog. hope it already nice. thanx for your nice job Bro..
regards,
Umat, http://okezone.org/umatblog
Cool, thanks for the review and nice comments 🙂
About that Flickr collections thing… last I checked, the official Flickr API doesn’t actually support collections yet, so it might be a while before it makes it into the plugin. But once it’s available via the API, I’ll be sure to include that feature.
It’s definitely one of my favorite plugins =)
I’ve tried this plugin and it’s great, but FAlbum eventually better suited my needs, see “review”: WordPress and photos 5: Flickr photo album plugins
I found it reaaaally slow, even after the fix that I found in the flickr group. It at least trebled my requests and I went from a five second load to a 30 seconds.
@I.A.M. what fix is this?
I.A.M not sure what fix you’re referring to, but i personally found my blog was double downloading prototype and a few other js libraries due to this and a few other plugins blindly loading them.
After sorting it out, i reduced the slow load time issues quite significantly, so you may want to look into that.
On the Flickr Tantan Plug-In Group Support group on Flickr… and I’m sure there’s no more convoluted way than that to describe them… there’s a recent thread about not parsing the cache in order to save about 20 seconds or more on the blog’s loading time.
go here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/t.....108083085/
This WordPress Flickr Photo Album plugin is very nice. I recommend to everybody.
might be a while before it makes it into the plugin. But once it’s available via the API, I’ll be sure to include that