Integrating Flickr with WordPress : 22nd July 2008
WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most popular blogging platforms, so it’s no surprise that there are a huge variety of different plugins to allow you to integrate Flickr with your blog posts. This article does include a sponsored review of iFlickr, but we’ll also be looking at other plugins available to mix these two online platforms together.
iFlickr Review
By way of a basic introduction, iFlickr is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily find free images on Flickr and insert them into your blog post while automatically putting the attribution link underneath. It can save you quite a bit of time when looking for related images to your blog post, but doesn’t satisfy the requirement you may have for putting your own personal images on your blog (we’ll cover some methods for doing this later on).
Here are some of the various bits we liked and didn’t like so much about iFlickr:
The Good
- iFlickr makes it very easy to search for images as you’re writing
- It gives you more flexibility and precision than other plugins which attempt to automatically find related images
- It’s a very simple way to add some graphical content to a news article or blog post
- It’s fairly easy to use CSS to customize the way the image appears
- It’s completely free!
The Annoying
- iFlickr only works with PHP5. This may be fine, but not all servers come with this by default
- You can’t choose to only show your own images
- It can be a bit tricky to get working correctly (it took us a while)
If you’re looking to use an appropriate Flickr photo with your blog posts on a regular basis, iFlickr is definitely a good way to go. However, if you’d like to mix things up in a different way, trying one of the following might be a better option:
Other Flickr/WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Flickr Manager – This is a very fully fledged offering, which lets you search for both personal and public photos and insert them into your posts. It’s not as simple as iFlickr, but you might appreciate the bigger set of features.
- Flickr Photo Album – This plugin allows you to add a set of photos to your site as an album. Rather than picking one or two images, you are able to display a whole collection. Great for showcasing screenshots, or your holiday pictures!
- FlickrRSS – This lets you display a selection of your Flickr images as a sidebar widget. There are some useful advanced options for customising the display exactly as you want it.
We’d be really interested to hear about any other plugins which you find useful for integrating Flickr with your blog – drop us a line below!
Comments and Discussion
wow this plugin is nice, i mostly use flickrRSS in my projects think its the easiest to use.
I'm using FAlbum on my website which looks something like this: http://www.schreiblogade.de/gallery/ It integrates well into WordPress and is really simple to set up and doesn't need PHP5. You can download it at: http://www.randombyte.net/blog/ Greetings
Great post! I love Flickr but integrating it with WP I've found annoying. So hopefully these will help. :D
Great! It will be good to keep photo album on site...Thanks for prefect plugin...:)
Great post. I'm using FlickrRSS. It's simple and very easy to set up.
Thanks for this advice. I currently use flickr to show off my web design portfolio (screenshots). I use a script with an iframe. It works fine until I edit the page and then the page editor decides it doesn't like the iframe tag and drops it. I'll definitely take a look at these plugins, the RSS one sounds like just the thing I need.
