Geodog

Fun hacking with Flickr: making a homemade Flickr tag badge with MagpieRSS

As people who read this site regularly may have noticed, I've been playing with Flickr recently. I don't want to like it -- it is Flash (ugh) based and very trendy -- but in spite of myself, I do. I won't consider using Flickr on a regular basis to store and display pictures until it has IPTC support, because my entire digital photo collection is already tagged using IPTC fields in the JPEG files, but there are indications that IPTC support will be added at some point in the future, hopefully soon. In the meantime, I have been having fun with Flickr.

One of Flickr's more interesting features is that you can search through the public photos displayed on the site by tag, á la del.icio.us. It also allows you to create a "badge" of your photos on your website. However, I'm not interested in seeing my pictures on my website, I want to see other people's photos, and I would like to use the tag to define what I want to see. For instance, I am interested in displaying photos tagged Berkeley on The Berkeley Blog. Flickr provides an RSS feed for each tag, so I can see recent Berkeley photos in my RSS reader if I want to, but it doesn't have a "badge" for tags. So I decided to create an unofficial "badge" to use until Flickr finds time to build an official one.

With a lot of assistance from the flexible MagpieRSS parser and the helpful folks on the magpierss mail list at sourceforge.net, I modified a little script someone drafted to use MagpieRSS to parse the tag RSS feed of your choice, and display the pictures on your site. You can see it in action at The Berkeley Blog and here:

Recent Berkeley photos posted to Flickr

The script itself is available for download if you want to check it out. Enjoy, and if you find it useful you can repay me by politely bugging the Flickr folks to build in IPTC support soon.

Note (11/24/2005): the script stopped working a while ago when Flickr changed their url structure, but I went and got an updated version of the script that Dave Kellan wrote and updated that to account for the new url structure, and all is working again. Thanks for all the improvements, Dave.