In Photos dot org

If you have a Flick Pro account, check out the new Flickr stats. You have to activate it first but it only takes 10 minutes or so for it to generate your stats.

What surprised me was that my Pink Flowers photo was the most viewed image yesterday. It’s a nice photo but by digging into the stats I see that search engines sent 71% of the traffic. Just goes to show that you should set the title of your photos carefully!

QOOP are offering a free postcard “while stocks last” that can be sent anywhere in the world. It prints from your Flickr stream and it’s dead easy to do.

What’s the catch? You need to sign up. For any company that’s well worth the minor cost of printing one postcard and mailing it. Still, free stuff is free stuff! (via)

I’m not sure how new this Flickr feature is, but it still has the “new” graphic next to it so I’m certain I’m sailing through unchartered waters for at least some of my visitors.

You’ve all probably been to the Recent Activity on your Flickr account by now, but tucked in at the bottom of that page is a link to Get updates by email.

Looks like Flickr can now email you when you get a new comment on a post, or when one of your contacts uploads a new photo! It’s also possible to do the former by subscribing to the feed on your recent activity page. That’s what I do, and I also use that feed in my Flickr comment importer to bring Flickr comments to this blog.

So, pick your medium, RSS or email. Which do you prefer for notifications?

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, the Flickr Blog is now hosted at WordPress.com! If you’re logged into the site you’ll see the familiar blue admin bar at the top of the page.

The latest post has some great shots of the STS-117 Atlantis launch. Better move your feed reader to the new feed!

Here’s a neat way of embedding Flickr’s slideshow feature in your own blog. flickrSLiDR asks you for a set in your Flickr stream and then gives you some html code to paste into your blog post.

He’s cheating a small bit though. He’s using Flickr’s own slideshow application and simply passing the right parameters to it. Take a look at the code at the end of this post to see for yourself!

Here’s a slideshow of my WordCamp 2006 photos. I’m looking forward to the next one in SF in July!

Oops. And just after publishing this post I realise that it’s a bad thing to post a Flash application that loads lots of photos so you have to click into this post to see the slideshows. They won’t show when in archive mode. Phew.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kilbrittain 6 miles

A sign points to Kilbrittain in Co. Cork near the beach at Garrettstown.

Has it been 2 years already Ryan? My Flickr account expires in February 2008 so I have a bit more time on my hands. It’s been well worth it however!

Plugin: Flickr Comment Importer
Purpose: Import comments on your Flickr stream into your blog.
Author: Donncha O Caoimh
Version: 0.1
Download: flickr-comment-importer.zip
Install: Copy into your WordPress plugins directory, change extension to .php, activate on the Plugins page and configure.
Alternate: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flickr-comment-importer/

If you use Flickr to host your photos this plugin will import the comments from your Flickr stream into your blog. Configure it by entering the RSS feed on Flickr’s recent activity page in the box provided.

Usage and Restrictions

• Your posts must have the same name as the Flickr photo. For example, The Thieving Duck blog post matches The Thieving Duck on Flickr. It’s ok to have multiple Flickr photos with the same name as one blog post.
• You can’t import all your old comments. It will only work with whatever Flickr puts in it’s comment feed which is the last ten comments.
• Your comments are imported when you’re doing stuff in your WordPress backend and placed into the moderation queue. Make sure you login to WordPress often if you have a busy Flickr stream!

Flickr has a wonderful mapping system that makes it super easy to view photos from a particular location. Unfortunately Flickr can’t automatically figure out where the photo was taken. That has to be done by the user but it’s as simple as opening the map in your browser and dragging it to the proper location. In the future your camera will do this for you like the brand new Canon 1D MKIII already does.

I do offer one warning. There are 17 pages of photos around Cork City center alone. It’s going to take you a while to get through them all but it’s an enjoyable romp around the city. You might even come across a few new sights! Go explore the city!

If discovering Cork isn’t enough, you can also visit Dublin, Galway, Limerick, Waterford, or even Blarney. Out of interest, I tried Mallow too but the link given for that doesn’t seem to work unfortunately.

I previously mentioned this mapping system here but it’s worth another look if you missed that post.

Plugin: Flickr Draft Post
Purpose: Instead of publishing, Flickr’s “Blog This” function will make a draft post to your blog.
Author: Donncha O Caoimh
Version: 0.1
Download: flickr-draft-post.txt
Install: Copy into your WordPress plugins directory, change extension to .php and activate on the Plugins page.

Flickr is very useful as a hosting platform for your blog’s images, and even provides some useful tools to making blogging your photos easier. Unfortunately the resulting blog post doesn’t always look right and requires editing afterwards.

During the summer of 2006 I attended a blogger dinner at which Shel Israel was present. Across a crowded dinner table he asked me why WordPress published his Flickr photos when he used the “Blog This” feature on Flickr. At the time my mind was on the delicious food in front of me and taken by surprise I couldn’t come up with a good answer. In hindsight, I should have said, “Because that’s the way Flickr did it”. You “Blog This” and it publishes. WordPress is only doing what the client wants. Thankfully, it’s possible for WordPress to fix the problem with this plugin.

I use Flickr’s “upload by email and blog this” feature. I simply compose my post in Thunderbird (select all and copy), attach the image and click Send. Then starts the hurried scramble to edit the text on Flickr which now has extra line breaks, broken urls and sometimes missing text. That’s why I copied the email, so I could paste it into Flickr. Once that’s done, I jump to this blog’s backend, edit the already published post, select the text of the post and correct it once again, scroll down and change the post status to ‘draft’. Now I have some time to think.

Why is it bad that Flickr published your post?

• Oh no! People are looking at my blog! I need to fix everything pronto, asap, straight away! The stress!
• In the past I found that Technorati didn’t immediately pick up on the categories I added to an already published post. I had to republish it.
• Now that Google is pinged when you publish, your malformed post may show up on Google Reader. This is also true of Bloglines or any other aggregator. I know it happens with planet sites that track this blog.
• There’s something missing. You get a chance to add UTW tags.

From: FlickrHQ
Subject: Update for Old Skool members

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

It seems that everyone is up in arms about recent changes at Flickr:

• Flickr and Yahoo! accounts must be merged into a Yahoo! login. If you have multiple Flickr account then you’re logging in and out of Flickr all the time, now do it with Yahoo! Surely you do most of your Flickr work in one account anyway, so why not make that the one your main Yahoo! account?
• Tags and Contacts are going to be limited. I see that this would affect a tiny minority of the userbase on Flickr, unfortunately for Flickr it’s likely to be the most active (and vocal?) membership. I also feel for Thomas with his Where I’ve Been Lately image because a lot of those tags will be removed but does anyone else have more than 75 legitimate tags on a photo? I’m sure I only have 15 at most on mine. Limiting contacts will hurt the most prolific users of the site such as Thomas Hawk, but others are probably just spamming the system.

Yes, the changes to tags and contacts will hurt a tiny minority but for almost everyone on the site it won’t make any difference. Yes, the change to using Yahoo! IDs will mean Yahoo knows about your photos, but if they know about your email and stock portfolio already what are you worried about? They’ve got more than enough demograpic data to go on to market to you!

Unfortunately I can’t recommend Zooomr either because their service is so slow - images take an age to download, and when they do download, they aren’t cached by the browser. It’s really frustrating using Zooomr.com when it’s so slow as it has so much potential and the people behind it are so smart and full of ideas! Fix the slow connection, caching and add a “blog by email” feature and I’d be over to Zooomr faster than you can say “Flickr sucks!”

There are plenty of pissed off Flickr users, but I’m not one of them. Have a nice day!

Update: Treasa is as upset as I am! Oh Lordy!

Update 2: Richard isnt worried either. Definitely a storm in a teacup.