I recently came across my all-time favorite WordPress plugin, Flickr Photo Album. It pulls in all of your Flickr photos, galleries and photo information, using the Flickr API and comes with a fully customizable template and stylesheet. I now have full control over how my photos from Flickr are displayed on Laughing Squid. It’s the best of both worlds. The Flickr community can still access my photos as before and now regular visitors to Laughing Squid can view the photos within the context of the website and then decide if they want to go over to Flickr to comment, add notes, tag or favorite the photos.
For individual photos, you have your choice of a page with all the the photo info (including comments, tags, etc. if you want) or a really great javascript lightbox window that you can navigate through. The individual gallery pages include a link to the wonderful Flickr slideshow feature. After installing the plugin, it quickly gave me access to all 14,000+ of my photos (it uses a caching function).
Another fantastic feature of this plugin is that it adds a “photo” tab in the upload section of your WordPress editing screen. That gives you access all of your photos or even other people’s photos (searching by tag). Once you find the photo you want to include with your blog post, just click on it and you are presented with 5 size options. Choose the size you want and it will automatically add the correct code to your blog post at the cursor location. This blows away the WordPress photo upload feature or Flickr’s “Blog This” option.
The Flickr Photo Album plugin was created by Washington DC web developer Joe Tan for a client at his company Silas Partners. What’s really great is that even though if was for their client, they released it under the GPL as an open source plugin. Kudos to Joe for developing such a great plugin.
Matt, you should bake this into WordPress. Flickr, you guys should consider adding something like this on your end, maybe even developing similar plugins for Movable Type, Blogger, etc.
