Use Flickr For Your Wordpress Blog Images - Flickr Photo Album Plugin

Reasons to use flickr instead of the built-in wordpress imaging tools:

1.       Flickr’s website gets a lot of internal traffic and you could increase your page views and website traffic just by putting all your images on flickr.  I personally have images with over 20,000 views that generated at least 1,000 click throughs (you can put live html links in the image descriptions).  Not bad considering it’s traffic I would have missed entirely.  Additionally flickr has been expanded to become a full fledged social network to include friends and messaging.

2.       Flickr offers a wide variety of image tools, like resizing, resamplling, and ajax grouping that completely rock and are far superior to anything built into wordpress.  IT’s fast too.  Upload a large image and flickr automatically provides multiple sizes and allows your visitors to do everything from favorite it to order prints.

3.       Having a central photo storage site makes it simple, fast and efficient to link to photos and integrate your photos on all the various social networks (myspace, digg, mybloglog, facebook).  If you have different photos spread around at many different long addresses it creates organization issues.

4.       It’s free and you never have to worry about hosting space, permissions, or any of the other issues that could potentially become a problem if you use the default wordpress tools (for example what happens when you move your blog or change the permalinks?).

5.       Since Flickr the largest photo sharing site ( http://flickr.com) it’s already seamlessly integrated into many of the most popular web services and social networks.  Plaxo, mybloglog are two quick examples.

6.       With the right wordpress plugins you can easily share all your galleries on a single page and have colorfully updated photo widgets to enhance the look of your blog, reduce bounce rate, and make the web more picturesque, all without requiring more than a few clicks and 0 code.

Ok so you’ve decided to switch to using flickr what’s the best way to use it entirely instead of the default wordpress image tool.

First you need to get a flickr account.  Go to http://www.flickr.com and sign up.  It’s free.  After you sign up, go ahead and upload a few sample images and put them in a gallery.

Download a wordpress plugin that will integrate your flickr photo sharing account with wordpress.  The two most popular plugins for dong this are FAlbum (http://www.randombyte.net/) and Flickr Photo Album (http://www.tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/).  I’ve personally used them both and prefer the Flickr Photo Album plugin, which is the one I’m going to use for this article.

Upload the plugin and activate it.

Go to settings - Photo Album

Click the Apply for your own Flickr API key (will open in new window).

At the “apply for your API Key ” page.  Put in your name e-mail and then select non-commercial use (This is referring to what you’re going to use the flickr API key for and the answer is with a free wordpress plugin, remember wordpress itself is free and open source.  You’re not going to be making direct money from the use of the API key so  it qualifies as non-commercial use you just want to put images in your open source wordpress blog.).

In the about the application box I put the following.

“Photo Album Plug-in for my Wordpress Blog at socialmediasystems.com”

Agree then click apply and you’ll get your key.

Select it with your mouse and press control c - then click where it says to configure user authentication for this key

Leave everything like it is.  I copy the “Photo Album Plug-in for my wordpress blog” into the application title and the description notes.

Then re-enter those keys into the plugin screen (remember it opened in a new window so this should be very easy to do.

Click next

Click Retrieve Flickr Permissions

Click OK

Now that you’ve done all those steps, any photo you put on flickr is now instantly available for you wordpress blog to use in posts or on pages.

To insert a photo from flickr go into write post or page.  Click the msall icon that looks like a blue dot next to a pink dot.  A lightbox will pop up allow you to choose any image in your flickr photosteam.  You can choose the size and the alignment.  Try it out and enjoy.

Additionally in the settings area of the flickr plugin you can choose to have your flickr photo albums displayed on a page and it gives you the option of putting what the page should be.  I used “photos” and you can see what the looks like at http://socialmediasystems.com/photos/

You can also use the sidebar widget which should automatically be available under design - widgets -Flickr Sidebar.  In the Edit window you can adjust he title, number of photos and if it displays the most recent of your public photos or a random selection.

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