In my previous post I explained why I said goodbye to Zenphoto and Gallery and started explaining why I said hello to Flickr. Flickr offers a free account that has a (bandwidth) uploading limit of 100 Mb a month and a Pro account for 24.95 USD that offers unlimited uploading. I started out with a free account and uploaded some pictures. One of the blogging options from Flickr is the “Blog This” button that sends a picture to your blog once you have configured your blog settings:

Step 1: define your blog software

Step 2: define your API Endpoint (this is the location of your xmlrpc.php file on your server) and supply your WordPress username and password.

Step 3: verify and confirm your details

As you can see Flickr uses the MetaWeblog API service to communicate with your WordPress.

MetaWeblog API (MWA) is a standard client-server application programming interface for weblog (blog) publishing. It is built on XML-RPC.¹

Flickr uses the MetaWeblog API to communicate WordPress using the XML-RPC protocol. The XML-RPC protocol is a very important protocol in blog software as it is also the basis for RSS, ping, trackback and Weblog Clients for offline blogging.

Before we are ready to use the Blog This button we need to define the layout of the image being posted on our blog:

Step 1: choose your template.

Step 2: Preview, use it or customize it.

Step 3: customize the layout. You can adjust the borders here or the text alignment and you can add additional metadata, see step 4.

Step 4: determine which metadata you would like to add or remove.

There are a few interesting things to note here:

• You cannot post images that are larger than 500 pixels wide. The average (medium) display size of a Flickr photo is 500 x 375 px which is very likely linked to the fact that designers are still optimizing webpages for 800 x 600 px displays. According to recent statistics 14% of the computers are still set to a 800 x 600 display². So if you use a 500 pixels width picture you still have 300 pixels left for navigation elements or other elements.
• A lot of blogs themes that have a fixed width layout also stick to the maximum of 800 x 600 (which is actually less because the browser sidebars take up space to). The traditional blog sidebar is around 150-180 pixels and if you add margins to leave some whitespace between your content you are left with an average blog picture that is also around 500 pixels.
• Customizing your layout is seen as something geeky and we are warned, as if we are about to do something dangerous: “Watch out! You have to be pretty geeky to add this stuff!”

Send a test post to your blog or just test the Blog This button and it should work great! We are now ready to display all the Flickr photos on our blog and our recent Flickr additions in the sidebar. Continue reading for my Flickr adventures and how to turn your WordPress blog into a Flickr photoblog.

1. MetaWeblog – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 27 April 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaWeblog>. [↩]
2. Browser Statistics. 27 April 2007 <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>. [↩]

My website, before I turned it into a blog, consisted mainly of a small portfolio. I hardly ever updated my portfolio except that I added a few pictures now and then in the photography section. Even though I was technically capable of designing and coding a minor addition or update could sometimes mean major work. This is one of the reasons I switched to the WordPress blog software; to facilitate easy additions. What WordPress doesn’t facilitate however is the easy uploading and managing of (multiple) files, see my post “Uploading and file management in WordPress.”

Because of the serveral reasons mentioned in my previous post I tried a few standalone galleries that handle the uploading and managing of photos much better. I tried two galleries that are both written in PHP (just like WordPress) and offer plugins to integrate with WordPress.

First I tried Gallery2 with the WPG2 plugin for WordPress but this resulted in some problems. On top of that I couldn’t get the Gallery to integrate in the look of my WordPress theme and after fiddling with the files for hours I simply gave up. I moved to the nice looking minimalistic Zenphoto with the ZenPress plugin for WordPress. File uploading is very easy, you just upload everything to a folder with the appropriate name and it automatically creates a photo folder with that same name. You can adjust titles and other information instantly thanks to Ajax. The ZenPress plugin adds a button to your visual editor to add photos but the interface is rather awkward. First you have to select a category and then you have to insert your pictures one by one, where you can chose from a range of options such as size and alignment for each of them. Unfortunately there is no way to insert a whole album into your blog with one click. You can set defaults for inserting your pictures but even with this option if you want to insert thumbnails for all the pictures in an album this means that you have to follow (at least) three steps:

1. Click ZenPress button
2. Select album
3. Select picture

Imagine if you have twenty pictures in an album. Of course you can link one picture to your album but then your visitor leaves your blog and goes to your album. What I want is to integrate the albums into my blog.

Another problem I encountered is that I am limited to a certain amount of webspace and bandwidth by my host. I have a basic account which means I can upload a total of 500 Mb and have 10gig a month of data traffic. When uploading pictures you easily reach the 500 Mb (a high res picture is almost 2 Mb). My main reason for using my own webspace for my pictures was that I wanted all my things in the same place. Of course I could buy more webspace, doubling my webspace to 1gig (and bandwidth to 20gig) would mean an additional 30 euros, but my whole photo archive is over 25 gig! It also wouldn’t solve my problem of integrating a gallery with WordPress. I had to search for a solution that might include hosting my pictures somewhere else. Then I rediscovered Flickr (Pro), which is even cheaper than doubling my webspace. A long time ago I used to have a Flickr account but I never used it because I used my own webspace so I deleted my account. But Flickr has grown (and so has my archive!) and expanded and don’t even get me started on the features they offer! Continue reading for my Flickr adventures and how to make a WordPress Flickr photoblog.

I have been wanting to bring my photo gallery back online but I really have been struggling with it. WordPress’ uploading system doesn’t facilitate easy and quick uploading of multiple files or folders. You can upload one file at a time through the interface which will be uploaded to the uploads folder in the content folder on your webserver. The file is stored in a subfolder with the name of the current month in a folder with the name of the current year. For example: wp-content/uploads/2007/04/filename.jpg

Uploaded files are managed by date instead of name or content further underlining the chronological descending order built into blogs (and blog software). In the interface you can only upload files when you are writing a post and after uploading the file is linked with this post. If you upload several files, one by one as multiple file uploading is not possible, you can browse through them using the “Browse” tab. If you want to use the file again for a different post you have to browse through all your uploaded files under the “Browse all” tab. The files are sorted in chronological descending order and not by post or filetype making it hard to find the right file. Also all the picture files are displayed as a thumbnail picture (which makes it hard to see the difference if there are two pictures that are quite similar) and the text is displayed by it’s title.

The upload form is separated from the writing form and the interface makes it seem that adding anything besides text is optional. It also indicates that adding more than a few images (or other files) to your blog post or reusing old files is not common. I think this points back to the days when blogs were text only but nowadays we want to add photos, videos, podcasts and more. To make this possible plugins have been developed that allow you to dissolve some of the restrictions of WordPress. Plugins have been developed to make it easier to integrate a photo gallery in WordPress. This series will deal with a few of these galleries and plugins and it will show you how to turn your WordPress blog into a photoblog using Flickr.