Flickr Photo Album For Wordpress

Last night, I managed to stay up very late and incorporate a huge new addition for Life of Justin. That would be the new Photo’s Page, which can also be accessed via the Photos button above.

The one thing I was struggling to do with this website was incorporate photos. I have thousands of pictures and it becomes very hard to share them with anyone. I have had a Pro Flickr account for a year now and I try to upload my favorite pictures there whenever I get a chance. I really like Flickr because it gives you a lot of options to organize, tag, and share photos. It also allows you to upload very large pictures which not all sites allow.

The problem I have been having lately, is that to share my Flickr photos I had to put links in my posts to Flickr to see my pictures. I hated this because when you run a website, the one thing you try to do is keep the reader on your page instead of sending them to an external one such as Flickr. I was also not liking the way Wordpress inserts photos into your blog posts.

Luckily, I managed to stumble upon the Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress plug-in. This handy little tool did a lot more than I thought it would. It displayed my albums, created thumbnails, a tag cloud, and even pulls up the titles of the images from Flickr. This sure beats trying to create my own photo album and uploading all my photos to my FTP server.

So here is the breakdown on what I went through to get the Flickr Photo Album plug-in up and running:

Install

The install was straight forward just like any other Wordpress plug-in. Simply upload the folder to the plug-in’s directory on your FTP server and then activate it via the Plug-in’s tab. There is a link on the plug-ins page that that says configure and this takes you to the photo albums setup page. You can also get there via the options tab in the Wordpress admin panel.

Configuring

Configuring the plug-in is also very easy. The hardest part is getting your Flickr account setup to work with the plug-in. You need to request an API key from Flickr and then authorize the plug-in to have access to your account. The entire authorization process only took about 15 minutes to setup. The other thing that needs to be done is deciding the URL of your photo album. You can name it just about anything and I decided that /photos would be the best for my site. So my album can be linked to by going to www.lifeofjustin.com/photos.

Managing Photos

Once your account is configured, all of your collections and sets from Flickr will automatically show up. All you need to do from there is decide which ones to show and which ones to hide. It also allows you to order the albums which decided which albums will show up at the top and vice versa. Now, the only thing left to do is view your photo album page and see if all of your pictures are displaying correctly. It looks very cool because each album shows the title with a few thumbnails below it. (Hint, you can change the number of albums to display by editing the HTML files that came with the plug-in). The Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress plug-in also lists all of the tags from your Flickr photos as well as a view slide show button. This is a very handy tool because it launches a photo viewer in a new windows that displays your photos.

A Few Tweaks

Of course, with any plug-in there are always a few small glitches that need to be fixed. The first problem I ran into was the pictures were to wide for the main content area of my blog. By default, the plug-in displays the medium sized picture of Flickr which is around 500 pixels wide. I managed to edit my style.css file and made my main content area wide enough to display the photos. I originally edited the HTML file to display “Small” images but they were to small and I could hardly see them.

Another problem I have yet to fix is the ShareThis button at the bottom of individual pictures. For some reason, when you click it and fill in the ShareThis information, it always sends the link to one of my old posts. It does not contain the link to the photo itself which is kind of weird. I am still looking to fix this so if anyone has any suggestions, please comment on this post.