In my post on how I automatically back up my WordPress blog I said that I save and pull all my images from Flickr. A few readers have asked how I do this and if pulling images from Flickr was allowed. The answer to the latter is yes, Flickr does allow you to embed images hosted by them onto your blog. As for how I put Flickr images on my blog, there’s an easy way and a hard way. The hard way is to go to your Flickr account to get the URL for the image you want to embed and entering it into your blog post. Here’s the easy way.
Flickr Photo Album for WordPress
The Flickr Photo Album for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates to match the look and feel of your own blog (See my photo album).
The plugin will also add a new Flickr icon to your WordPress edit screen. Clicking the icon will bring up your Flickr photo stream which allows you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks. You can either have your inserted photos link back to your WordPress Flickr photo album or directly to your Flickr.com photo page.
Flickr Photo Album for WordPress is pretty easy to install and use. However, making a custom photo album may require the help of your web designer. Most bloggers either use the supplied template or just link to their photo albums on Flickr. From a branding stand point, it’s better to keep the album on your blog and create a new template that matches your blog’s look and feel.
Having my images hosted on flickr has many advantages. I save on bandwidth and storage cost. Why use up my bandwidth when I can use Flickr’s? Backing up my blog to Amazon S3 with the Automatic WordPress backup plugin cost less money as well since I don’t have to backup the images. Flickr has their own backup system to make sure your images are safe and secured.
Flickr is extremely economical. You are allowed to upload up to 200 images for free. Go above that and you’ll have to upgrade to a Pro account which cost $24.95 a year ($47.99 for two years). The Pro account allows you to upload an unlimited number of images.
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Awesome post John. I’ll utilize this on my photo blogs!
Yes and this one will save great amount of time.
Thanks for explaining in such detail John – I’m going to give it a try right now
Long time no see Heather.
After that competition first time I am seeing you here.
Great way to save bandwidth indeed. Will definitely take a look at using Flickr as my “image server”
Has there been downtime with Flickr on your blog John?
Flickr is owned and powered by Yahoo! When was the last time you saw Yahoo! go down?
Think Geocities, gone, finished
http://geocities.yahoo.com/index.php
John, Bandwidth is so cheap, I can’t see cost being a valid reason. I wouldn’t rely on a third party to host images.
Supposing they have a change of direction and decide at a later date to close their door or no longer offer the service. You’d have a lot of work on your hands.
I think the chances of your current web host going under is greater than Yahoo! owned Flicrkr.
That’s true, But….
If my host went under, I could move all my files to another host and be up and running fairly quickly without having to re-point my blog posts to a new url image as I use relative urls.
If Yahoo decided to close shop on Flickr, I would gather that you would have to recode all of your posts as they probably point to flickr.com/image1.jpg etc.
Coincidentally today, the Yahoo Ad network is closing
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174550/Yahoo_to_shut_down_small_publisher_ad_network
John, do you ever worry that people will see images from timestamped posts in your flickr before the post goes live?
Na. I don’t care if they see it. The image can never give them the full story. If anything, it builds hype.
With those photos we got an idea what kind of posts are coming and because of that our curiosity increase more.
You may worry if your blog is photograph blog.
I am not even aware that you can host the image on flikr and then embed it to your blogpost. I am just hosting the image on my hosting account.
Start using flickr and with this your loading time will also increase.
I always learn tons of stuff about wordpress from your blog John. Love the W3TC idea – I’m gonna try these too. Thanks.
COOL! I’m going to give it a try! Thanks for sharing John!
Great timing on this post John, as we just deployed this solution for one of our clients. We had to make some minor tweaks to the plug-in, as the theme wouldn’t fully cooperate with it.
http://www.bonjovifansite.com/pictures/ – The start of their photo gallery.. They’ve still got another 1000+ pictures to upload to Flickr!
I have heard about filckr for long time but still not use it because I choose to put my picture directly in my blog host server.
If you keep doing that, you will eventually run out of space. And your backup cost will increase.
Plus loading speed of your website will also decrease.
Google do not like slow loading website my friend.
Thanks for this post, very helpful. I’ve been wondering how to implement this on my blogs.
Please can u explain how u get.individual images embedded on ur page. One photo per page…I love how people can comment on your individual photos. Thanks!
That is a feature of the plugin.
Great post …bro …
gonna try this…thanks for …sharing….:)
I use TanTan Noodle’s addon. Love it! Easy to pull in your photos from Flickr.
I’m actually working on a photo portfolio site via Flickr’s API and my MadCodingSkillz that allows me to pull a collection, organize it by sets within the collection and then display the photos I have placed within those sets. It displays: Title, Photo, Description, and even EXIF data.
Makes my websites really small when I use Flickr as my photo host
Saves on bandwidth (for me) too!
Neat addon you’ve got there john, that takes keywords within comments and links them to things such as Flick r
Ya, that plugin is by http://www.johnchow.com/ninja
Haha that’s an awesome way of saving on space and that precious bandwidth! Awesome
Maximum bloggers are using this as they know the importance of fast download and saving bandwith.
Yep, I use this on my personal blog too. The default template kinda sucks, so I just make them link to my Flickr page still. It’s incredibly easy to insert your Flickr photos with this plugin though.
Thank you for posting this. I have been continually frustrated by finding the url for a flickr image. I am going to implement this right now.
Thanks for sharing John! It is very useful for saving space and bandwidth!
Thanks a ton for the guide john. This is the best guide for integrating flickr on a wordpress blog.
Good writeup. But then getting the flickr plugin to work on a blog takes A LOT of work.. You have to make sure everything is compatible with your theme and I just find it really hard.
its worth the effort!
like this plugin
I am using flicker plug in but this one is best way to add flicker pictures to blog
Thanks for the tips, John! It’s nice to have another option besides saving Google images and re-uploading. We will definitely try this out on the TM blog.
-Michelle Pappas, Marketing Manager, Tatto Media.
The plugin is too old. This would only work for Wordpress 2.7. Maybe if we haven’t upgrade our Wordpress version then we could benefit from this.
It’s working fine on my Wordpress and I’m using the latest version. Maybe you should try it before saying it doesn’t work?
Certainly you should not upload your photos to your hosting server as this one will result slow loading of your websites.
Plus if you are using adsense in your website than flickr photos album will be another way to earn income as well.
Hmm… may be I will transfer my website’s “link to me” badge to Flickr. That way, I can save my bandwidth. Thanks for the idea.
But please note that only 200 images are free in flickr. After that you will have to be paid member, but yes this one is affordable.
This sounds good. My son has a photography website that is powered by wordpress and all the images are hosted on the server. It used to be very, very slow to load. Now, I had him install WP Super Cache and it is lighning fast!
I suppose hosting the images on flickr would also speed it up a lot. But right now, I think it is perfect! Also, often times on other people’s sites I see them have flickr photos but they are not there. The photo is just the flickr logo saying that the image is currently unavailable. Does this plugin prevent this?
Oh dear, how does that happen? Doesn’t the webmaster know that the image is currently unavailable?
That WP can save you a ton of time.
I love Flickr pics!
surely people are already keeping offline backups of all their blog images ?
I’ve been pulling images in the creative commons section, properly citing owners, and using Apture to keep traffic on my site.
Bryan
I have an account with Flickr, but upload less than 10 images. I upload some images in Associated Content, where i get pennies for page view impressions.
Flickr would give pretty of warning if they shut down so you can download your images, like what AOL did when they killed off their Dropbox type service. They gave everyone three months to move their stuff. At any rate, Flickr is a profit center for Yahoo. It makes them money, unlike the money losing YPN or Goecities. Unless something bad happens to Flickr’s business model, I doubt you’ll see it go away.
It’s not that hard to re-point URLs. Just do a global fine and replace. Will take less than a min.
I think you should write a post about this as well John.
Keep this topic in your list.