One of the nice things about Flickr is that because of their open API a whole host of developers have built more and more interesting things to do with the site. It’s interesting to me today that so many of the ways that I use Flickr are not even through the site as designed by Yahoo, but instead through the work of outside developers who are constantly creating new and interesting ways to experience the site. Today I thought I’d share what I think are the top 10 Hacks on Flickr.
This list is by no way exhaustive or complete, but as somewhat of a power user who uses the site every day I thought I’d offer some tools that you might want to try out. One note is that many of the best hacks on Flickr today are being done through Greasemonkey scripts. These will not work with Internet Explorer but will work with Firefox or Flock.
So on with the list.
1. The number one hack for Flickr would have to be Flickrleech. Flickrleech is a site developed by Andrew Houser (who is also a kick ass photographer), or simply Houser as he is often called, with the tagline, “because paging sucks.”
When Houser released Flickrleech originally it would allow you to pull up any Flickr user’s photos as a full page of thumbnails with no pagination. Although very cool, loading up 7,000 thumbnails wasn’t exactly the nicest things to do to Flickr’s servers and Houser actually changed his site to load 500 thumbnails at a time and today it sits at 200 thumbnails at a time.
Still, having the ability to browse a flickr user’s photos at 200 thumbnails at a time is remarkable and allows you more photos on a single page than anything Flickr offers up themselves.
I’m constantly using Flickrleech to check out a new photographer’s photos or to rapid fire go through someone’s stream.
By the way, the bandwidth for Flickrleech is not cheap and Houser subsidizes it, so if you like it and use it might I recommend that you help the man out by making a donation to his Paypal account that he has on the site.
2. The number two hack for Flickr is a newer one and was released earlier this month by Intel’s Eric Appel and is called SmartSetr. One of the annoying things about Flickr is that when you want to create a set you must do it manually. Even with batch tools this gets tedious and having to add every new photo to a set every single time sucks. So Eric developed SmartSetr. SmartSetr allows you the ability to build sets that are organized around the concepts of tags, dates, and other metadata associated with a photo.
If, for instance, you want to build a set called Neon Days and Neon Nights (like I did) that holds all of your photos of neon signs, by building a SmartSet you can simply tell flickr to add any photo tagged neon to this set. Although SmartSetr isn’t dynamic, Eric refreshes your sets for you once a day and things get updated. It’s also really cool that you can organize your set by interestingness, so that your best photos show up first in the set — something you can’t do on Flickr. More from Eric directly.
3. The number three hack for Flickr is a greasemonkey one called Flickr Multi Group Sender. It was developed by Steeev (who does some of the best Flickr development work around) One of the problems with Flickr’s add to group function is that it is painfully and woefully slow. I’m not sure if this is because Flickr is trying to load up little mini thumbnail icons for every group or if it’s something to do with how you access their database but it’s weak sauce. But multi group sender makes this much easier. Multi group sender allows the add to groups function for photos on flickr super fast. You can also add to multiple groups at once by simply holding down the control key… opps, I mean command key (I keep forgetting I’m on a Mac).. and selecting another group. Careful with adding your photos to too many groups though. Adding your photo to more than about 10 groups gets you dinged in interestingness.
4. The number four hack for Flickr is another greasemonkey one. This one is called Flickr rich edit and it was written by Jason Rhyley. Sometimes when you say something, you really want to say something. Unfortunately natively Flickr has no rich edit tools and so users must be familiar with how to manually mark up their text or they can just use this tool. By using rich text edit you are able to add rich text edit tools above text boxes on Flickr so that you can better get your point across when you need to.
5. Tabblo. This is kind of an unusual one. Maybe not so much of a hack, but it sure feels like one. Tabblo is a photosharing site that allows you the ability to customize the feel, layout, tone and design of your photo page. The yin and the yang of Flickr is that everyone’s pages look the same. On the one hand this gives Flickr a very elegant, almost like a virtual art gallery or museum feel. On the other hand sometimes people want more customization over how their photos are presented. Some companies like SmugMug make this customization part of how they diferentiate from Flickr. Flickr is torn because while you might like to give users more control over the design of the photos, if you’re not careful, the next thing you know the place ends up looking like MySpace.
Enter Tabblo. Tabblo uses the Flickr API to import your photos into their site and then allows you the ability to design a page however you like. The nice thing about Tabblo is that unlike SmugMug the site is free and with a direct Flickr import function makes it super easy to design special custom pages using your Flickr photos. Here’s a tabblo with some of my shots from New Orleans last year.
6. Flickrmud. One of the problems for some Flickr users is that because the site is popular ofentimes it gets blocked. A while back Flickr was being blocked in the entire UAE. There have been reports of libraries blocking Flickr and certainly businesses blocking Flickr who don’t want their employees wasting away valuable company time on social networking or seeing the occasional porn shot that creates company liability. While one answer is to simply buy your own laptop with EVDO and bring it to work, this isn’t always the most economical approach. But if you are experiencing Flickr blockage somewhere check out FlickrMud. How Flickr mud works is that you simply change the url to access Flickr. Instead of
accessing thomashawk’s flickrstream like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk. You access it with this url instead: http://www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com/photos/thomashawk. By adding the .mud.yahoo before the .com oftentimes you can access the site because this way of accessing Flickr is much less known and less likely to be blocked. Mum’s the word on this one of course 😉
7. Moo Cards. Again, not so much of a Flickr hack as a tool for the flickr photographer. One of the problems with the outside world (yes even with Stewart and Caterina on the cover of Time magazine, etc. etc.) is that outside your immediate bubble of friends, a whole chunk of the world has no idea what Flickr is. As a photographer out there shooting all the time people will ask me where they can see my work. Even if you say “flickr” “thomas hawk” etc. People will forget. By ordering up some Moo cards (they are only about $25 for 100) you can give these cards out to people when they ask where they can see the shots.
Of course one hack with your Flickr Moo cards is that you don’t actually have to send them to your Flickrstream. My Flickr Moo cards have my Zooomr stream ID url on there instead. Opps, did I just say that, Doh!
8. Slickr. One of the things that is cool about Flickr is that there is an amazing amount of fanastic images online. This is cool and all but Flickr’s slide show functionality sucks, it’s not full screen, etc. This is where Slickr comes in. Slickr allows you the ability to point Slickr to someone’s photostream, your photos marked favorites, etc., etc. and then actually download full high res photos of all of whatever you point it to to your computer. It was developed by Gabriel Hanford. Once on your hard drive you can better make use of these images for your screen saver or for your desktop backgrounds and all that. One of my favorite things to do is to sit back and watch my Media Center PC rotate through my favorites from Flickr on beautiful full high res clarity.
One note with this. You might want to check out the photo license of the photos that you choose to download with Slickr. Although Slickr works with all licenses, technically you’d be breaking the rules by downloading an all rights reserved licensed photo. Creative Commons licensed photos of course (like mine) are free to use for non commercial (in my case) use and if you want to download all of my images for your screen saver, desktop, etc., or even just one of my sets like Superfaves, feel free.
9. Flickr Friends (formerly Flickr Stalkr). Flickr Friends got off to a rough start originally at Flickr. Developed by James Newbery it was initially named Flickr Stalkr and well, that just didn’t sound right and so they saw themselves get nipped in the bud early on. Subsequently though the site relaunched as Flickr Friend Finder and is a way for you to find all of your friends (or ex-girlfriends, opps, did I just say that too?) on Flickr. With Flickr Friend Finder you simply enter in a string of email addresess (or upload your address book to them) and they will return back to you everyone who is on Flickr. You can then add them as friends to make sure to keep tabs on what they are up to photographically speaking. James has the following privacy statement up on his site:
“Your addresses will not be stored anywhere, read by anyone, or made accessible to anyone. Any file you upload will be deleted from the server immediately.”
…of course it’s up to you whether or not you think it’s a good idea or right to use your friend’s email addresses this way.
10. jUploadr. One of the things about Flickr’s bulk uploader tool (in my opinion) is that it is not very good. Especially on a Mac it is very slow to load, won’t strip the .jpg titles from the names of my photos, etc. jUploader was developed by Steve Cohen and offers a better, faster, way to upload. You can enter in default tags, descriptions, etc. for all of your photos or you can easily select photos to bulk tag/descript before uploading to Flickr. jUploader is also our official uploader for Zooomr as well and if you want to upload your shots to Flickr and Zooomr, once you are done with one you can simply click on the other to send your photos there as well. jUploadr runs on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Related posts:
Top 10 Ways to Find Great Photos on Flickr
Top 10 Tips for Getting Attention on Flickr
If you like these Flickr hacks feel free to digg them here.
Oh Thomas… Please tell how to make moo working with zooomr!
Hey Thomas,
This is a fantastic roundup post! I’ve seen a couple of these before, like Flickrleech and the Moo cards, but there’s a ton of new useful ones for me here.
The Multi Group Sender and jUploader! My god man, these are sexy! I feel like I need to be bribing you with chocolate for showing me these.
very informative and use list. Thanks Thomas
Wow Thomas, these are some great finds. I’ve already hooked my entire office on Slickr, and already ordered my Moo cards, but the rest are new to me. I’m really looking forward to checking out SmartSetr. I’ve been looking for something that would do that for a while.
Good stuff, thanks. A few of those I hadn’t heard of. Now, if I can only remember to actually bring some of my Moo cards with me when I go out.
you forgot my flickr large slideshow. put your camera’s megapixel to use! http://www.tinou.com/flickrslideshow.jsp
Great list!
A bit more specialized, but if you use RapidWeaver, you might like the RapidFlickr plugin. It extracts photos from Flickr via tags or dates, etc. for use on your website, either as photos or a slideshow. It can do it dynamically.
Example: static slideshow
Example: dynamic camera phone photos
Slickr seems to be less a way to download a bunch of full-res images and more of a Windows XP-only slideshow/screensaver creator. Is there way, with a Mac, that I can do what Thomas’ description implies: download a particular set of photos to the hard drive without individually right-clicking them?
Thanks!
Anonymous. Yes, Slickr is primarily designed as a Windows slide show, but how it works is that it downloads all of the photos into a folder for their slideshow to use. Rather than use their slide show, just point yourself to that folder where the photos are saved and you have access to them with whatever software you want. The names are saved as funny alpha numeric files and none of the meta data is there, but the image itself is there and you should be able to access it at that point however you’d like.
Take a look at powersnap its Flickr’s answer to Picasa. http://www.powersnap.com
I use the multiple group sender and it’s pretty good, wish it greys out the sent groups for even better management
Hey Thomas ,, as always an informative post.
I use a Hack called Flickr Set Manager
its from dopiaza.org
Flickr Set Manager allows you to automatically create new sets on Flickr based on various criteria such as interestingness, date posted and tags, or even from a random set of photographs.
I use it on my flickr site to create a interestingness set
Here is a link
http://www.dopiaza.org/flickr/setmgr/
Exellent list, but how about Flickr Storm. A great way to handle and present a Flickr search.
http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
I don’t mean to take away from your post, but these aren’t hacks. please get your terminology right.
How about FlickrBooth? Nice hack for uploading photo booth photos to flickr if you happen to be a mac user.
How about FlickrBooth? Nice hack for uploading photo booth photos to flickr if you happen to be a mac user.
Nice, but this one is better.
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/
Love every single one of ’em. especially MOO….moo is my new best friend 😛
to the person who asked about a flickr downloader like slickr that’s not Windows only…I give you my flickr downloader
flickr downloader
it’ll download photos to your computer via an Applet.
You’re forgetting Flickr Stream which lets you connect and get the flickr images without the common api, so you can use ajax + json to get the images for any account or search up items.
hi Thomas
cool and fantastic, thanks dude
Great tips! For standard flickr automation i use imacros (a great free firefox extension: http://www.iopus.com/imacros/firefox/ )
San8
What about Retrievr — the visual search for flickr?
Thomas.. Brilliant one.
great list, bookmarked 🙂
For the true flickr addict, consider Flock. It combines the functionality of a bunch of these extensions, including friend-tracking, batch uploads and downloads, and thumbnail browsing. It’s also got a lot of other cool social features.
http://www.flock.com
I use Screensvr for a Favorites screensaver – it automagically makes them appear via my always-on Internet.
I’m sure jUploadr is a great tool, but don’t forget about Fotofox!
thx Merodema fer the heads up on this*
Some really good mentions here Hawk*
;))
glad to see U gave props to Steeev – he’s really done some fatastic & time saving useful tweaks to Flickr*
Mortimer of 6v8 Production of my Mind also has some amazing Hacks*
Flickr Favourite Contacts allows U to see all yer Contacts ranked according to those U have the most faves on*
http://6v8.gamboni.org/Flickr-Favorite-Contacts.html
My Fave of ALL time is FlickrFox*
allows U to see any View of Flickr Photos from yer Contacts or Groups streaming Live into yer Sidebar*
awesome!!
by Phil McCluskey of Codestream*
http://philmccluskey.com/projects/flickrfox/
fd’s Flickr Toys also deserves Huge Props fer some Fun Flickr stuff*
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/
FlickrInspector will Blow U away too*
Incredible Data on Flickr Users*
http://netomer.de/flickrtools/inspector/?nsid=44276476@N00#top
another GreaseMonkey*
http://www.randomchaos.com/software/firefox/greasemonkey/degradr/
The Great Flickr Tools Collection which lists All or most of the Flickr Hacks can be found here at http://mentalaxis.com/words/flickr-tools/
they did Badgr*
which brings me to the Flickr Flash Badge – the Grandaddy of ALL Web2.0 Widgets & thee coolest thing I’ve ever seen on the Internet*
does anybody know who did that??
Brilliant stuff!!
http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne
& finally cuz I like giving Props to the Artists on Flickr who have made Flickr MORE than just another Boring Photography site & I don’t like NIPSA or Censorship – here’s an awesome Flickr Art tool by Flikr*
http://meblar.org/agony/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/agony
Cheers Everybody!! Billy ;))
Peace*
Thomas,
I have been a long time reader of your blog and I like it very much.
Now on with my question.. since you have some inside knowledge of things at Zooomr, do you know of any API’s there that we as developers can use?
So far I have seen nothing on the site.
Regards,
Barry
Actually, Yahoo, didn’t design Flickr, it was bought by them.
spankaccount. which makes it their’s now. When Flickr applied for a patent recently on interestingness it wasn’t as flickr it was as Yahoo. 😉
Yuo forgot flickrbabes.com 🙂
Yeah, take a look at PowerSnap. Its a slick Flickr App
Hi Thomas! I’m a big fan of your whole right-to-photography thing, so I’m glad you like the Rich Edit script. The version of the script you’ve linked to, though, is a bit out of date. I still get feedback and incorporate it into the script from time to time, and the most recent version will always be here.
You know, I never did think that something that took a grand total of three hours of work would be so popular.
I’m a resident of the UAE and we have recently been re-denied access to http://www.flickr.com again.
I tried the mud prefix and managed to access the site, but the images however refuse to load. Any ideas?
You should also check out slideshowr.org. It
also lets you create slideshows (including of your private photos) and then email a unique link to friends and family.
You should also check out slideshowr.org. It
also lets you create slideshows (including of your private photos) and then email a unique link to friends and family.
dumpr.net offers quite a few toys for flickr users. Most notable are the amazing-circles effect, the museumr tool, and the awesome fave-findr.
Here you have my top in case you’re interested
http://www.w3top.org
http://www.flickrforum.com
has anyone seen flickranywhere.com?
flickRanywhere is a Flash photo app that lets people embed a gallery on myspace, blogs etc., basically anywhere that you can embed flash. it’s really easy to set up too. I have it on my myspace page
great list! thanks!
Thanks for sharing this nice list!
Great rundown. Thanks for the awesome tips. I have been looking for a site like Tabblo for quite some time.
Thanks for the list.. I have been looking for a list of hacks to go through and kinda stumbled on this blog =)
Thanks so much.
hi thomas. thanks to your top 10 hacks for flicker. it’s been a great help for me.
hi! i am a budding photographer and i would like to ask for some tips in digital photography. 🙂 please send it to nobita_07manutd@yahoo.com. thanks a lot.
Please tell how to make moo working with zooomr!
Nice list, but the Lightroom plugin deserves to be mentioned I think.
thanks
thanks
Nice list, thanks
Thomas
Your number one hack is no more I just checked that link it is gone, the guy closed the project down …so on with number two …:-)
Marc;-)
PS: Great Blog
love your content. great stuff and great advice.. not weak sauce!!
@alexandracopley
Nice list, but the Lightroom plugin deserves to be mentioned I think.
I’m really very useful to follow a long-time see this as a blog here Thank you for your valuable information.
” Please tell how to make moo working with zooomr! “
Nothing I did not understand. Can someone tell me some more detailed
Great – Thanks you.
” Please tell how to make moo working with zooomr! “
good article and very nice site
But has the last word been said ? Is all hope to be lost? Is the defeat final No !Amethyst Beads
ss
very good
good article and very nice site
I like the post is a good work that it can offer more effective imformation for us!
Nice list, but the Lightroom plugin deserves to be mentioned I think.
I have been reading your posts during my afternoon break, and I must admit the whole article has been very useful and very well written. I thought I would let you know that for some reason this blog does not display well in Internet Explorer 8. I wish Microsoft would stop changing their software. I have a question for you. Do you mind exchanging blog roll links? That would be really cool!
Great post.Nice hack.Thank you.
good
i like it
Interesting read. There is currently very a great deal of information around this topic close to and about about the net and some are most defintely better than other people. You have caught the detail here just right which makes for a refreshing change – many thanks.
Great information, many thanks to the author. It is incomprehensible to me currently, but in general, the usefulness and also significance is overwhelming. Thanks again and nice luck!
very goood site. thank you.
nice list, thank you man.
“No, louis vuitton sunglasses no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents ralph lauren polo shirts which will prada sunglasses happen stella mccartney handbags when you have four million
Always good to see, this was a brilliant post. In theory I would like to write like this too. You need time to creat that interesting and additionally real effort to make such a good article
Excellent tips .I really appreciate all these points, and I agree completely…
88
Thank a lot.
Shox R5
Alors que la communauté internationale convaincue de sa défaite aux dernières élections ne fait que lui demander de respecter le verdict des urnes qui le donne
nice list, thank you man.
[…] Flickr Hack #9 Image by Thomas Hawk thomashawk.com/2007/01/top-10-hacks-on-flickr.html […]
great stuff my friend, i will add that into my blog, well done.
roll forming machine Thomas Hawk thomashawk.com/2007/01/top-10-hacks-on-flickr.html […]
amazing amount of fanastic images online. This is cool and all but Flickr’s slide show functionality sucks.
best windshield wipers
Champagne Shoes
good article and very nice site
I’m really enjoying the theme/design of your blog. Do you ever run into any web browser compatibility issues? A few of my blog audience have complained about my site not operating correctly in Explorer but looks great in Opera. Do you have any ideas to help fix this problem?
Good day! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a team of volunteers and starting a new project in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us beneficial information to work on. You have done a outstanding job!
Hello there! I know this is kinda off topic but I was wondering if you knew where I could locate a captcha plugin for my comment form? I’m using the same blog platform as yours and I’m having problems finding one? Thanks a lot!
thanks nice site.