Today I was working on a new blog over at PPTClasses.com and I wanted to highlight some content by using photos. I wanted to take advantage of the latest news that Flickr increased the size allocation for files, Flickr is Biggr. All I wanted to do was put some thumbnails in the footer of the template, I thought i would be a simple task?
I primarily needed a way to take pics from my Flickr photostream that were categorized in a set. I didn’t want my dog photos or pics of my favorite foods, I was just trying to add specific images (and nothing else). So, here are a few of the plugins I tried:
Awesome Flickr Gallery was the first one I installed (it is still there, I need to find out more about this one). It didnt do what I wanted, but it was so powerful I am hanging on to it and I want to see how I might be able to use it for other purposes.
Slickr Flickr was not tested with my current version of WP, but I tried it anyway. It had high ratings and good reviews, in the end it required shortcode implementation and I just needed something simple that I could add as a widget, plug in my Flickr username and launch. Not a bad plugin, just not for this project.
Searching on “Flickr widget” in the Search Plugins there were about 5 that came to the top. I tried Fast Flickr Widget, it had 5 stars and looked like it was going to work. Actually it did, but the pics were bigger than I wanted them and I couldn’t resize them, so another good plugin was removed.
So after doing some searching, I came to Flickr’s own Badge. This was new to me, so I gave it a try. There are two types of badge to choose from: HTML or Flash. You will be able to select to display things from your own collection, one of your groups, or everyone’s uploads. You can also filter any of these options by a tag, if you wish. I was able to choose my photostream, select the specific set I wanted, select the photo size, determine the orientation (vertical vs. horizontal), choose colors to go with me theme, and I was done.
Here is an example of a Flickr Badge:
www.flickr.com
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A Flickr Badge might not work for your every application when you are trying to get thumbnails of some photos in your WordPress blog, but in my case this worked just perfect. I still have some more investigation that I want to do and if anyone knows of a better way to add small thumbnals to the footer in a theme, please post up your ideas in the comments section. Thanks.
Dan Elder
Topsarge Business Solutions