Flickr slideshow plug-in

- This extension requires registration to download.
[flickr set= xxx] (where xxx is the set id, brackets can be changed to {})
The plugin supports various type of media from flickr:
- Single photo’s ( [flickr photo=xxx] )
- Sets ( [flickr set=xxx] )
- Videos ( [flickr video=xxx] )
- User photo streams ( [flickr user=xxx] )
- Group pools ( [flickr group=xxx] )
- Tags ([ flickr tag=" xxx xxx"] )
Other high regarded features are:
- Authentication: Access all photos on your flickr account and control privacy settings
- Enable or disable download of the original photos
- Multiple thumbnail styles
- Display one flickr photo on your website linked to a selection of flickr photos in the image viewer.
The plugin features the popular and highly configurable Highslide image viewer to display your flickr photos. The plugin includes various options to configure the image viewer and more will be available in future releases.
## A license to use Highslide with the flickr slideshow plugin on commercial websites is included with your download. ##
Please visit our website for a demo and full overview of all the features of the flickr slideshow plugin.
I just had an issue on my webserver due to a very recent PHP config.
Jason kindly replied me (on holidays !!!) and a couple of days later, I had an update in my mailbox... what could I ask more ???
New quality extensions maybe ;-)
Michaël Frippiat
Thank you for your review. It is highly appreciated! :-)
If I may give a suggestion for a next release: I am using the plugin in a blogsite and I am using the option to put one picture in an article. It would be nice when you put a small picture in the article, you can click on It to view the photo in normal size. You can use the set function, but I think the thumbnail is too small for the articles and then I need to make for each photo a new set in flickr.
Thank you for your review. It is highly appreciated!
Since you posted your review I've uploaded a new version of the plugin to the website which includes the requested feature. Secondly in this version I also improved the loading speed of single pictures. (set image description to none for single photos. Loading titles or descriptions for single images requires an extra API call which takes extra time and slows down your site.)
Thanks for the review Kat, it was a pleasure helping you out. :-)
thanks
Thanks for the review Dick! It is highly appreciated. Over the last few months I spent quite a lot of time working on the new plugin, the new website and the elaborate user guides. It is always good to hear people appreciate the hard work. :-) Keeps me motivated.
The author's contact form does not work (mail function error when have written detailed explanation).
I fixed the contact form and added my email address as well. Could you please contact me, so we can have a look on how to fix this for you. Thanks in advance.
The authentication method is very easy.
I actually had a lot of problems making this plugin work but Jasper made himself avaiable to find where was the problem (turns out that the problem was in my provider's firewall).
Thanks a lot for all the good work!
Thanks for the review Dr. Weiss. It was a pleasure helping you out! Besides that, you pointed out some issues for improvement, which improved the plugin. So thank you for the help as well! :-)
Thanks to Jasper (and team) for all the efforts they put into it.
I just stumbled into a small issue while installing as per the tutorial on the Website which mentions
[flickr install=authentication] should as rightly said in the image be [flickr install=authenticate]
Rest, all neat. :)
Thanks for the review. It is highly appreciated. :-)
As for the issue concerning the install statements. Thanks for noticing the difference between text and image. Although the plugin will accept both [flickr install=authenticate] and [flickr install=authentication], I'll change it in the text to avoid confusion. :-)
Has anyone got an idea why that would happen?
btw: I find it extremely slow when i want to display a set of 25+ pictures. I read that this could be solved by enabling the caching time...which amout of time should i type in?
Could you please contact me by email, so we can see if we can resolve this issue. This might help development and other users as well.
The plug-in is indeed quite slow upon displaying a set of pictures for the first time. Unfortunately this is due to the lack of speed of the flickr API, so I can't do much about that. Enabling caching should resolve that issue for the time the results in the cache are valid. By default the cached results are valid for 24 hours (86400 seconds). You can change the cache settings in the basic options of the plug-in.
My gripe isn't with the program. My dissappointment is that there is absolutely no way to contact the developer. You can look thru the installation documention and FAQs on the website, but if that doesn't work, you are out of luck!
There are links to a forum, but the links are broken. There is no Contact Us link. It would be nice to see someone take ownership of this really nice extention!
Thanks for yor review. As I have a bit of time on my sleeve, so I'll dig into updating the plugin to Joomla 1.6 shortly. Keep posted. ;-)
I hacked flickrslideshows.php to add the code below after line 986
then I get pagination after 25 pictures, might be handy for a next release
$this->photoCounter++;
$pageno=floor($this->photoCounter/25);
$teller=fmod($this->photoCounter,25);
if ($teller==0) {
$this->HTMLOutput .="$teller,$this->photoCounter,";
}
I tried all of the Flickr plug-ins and this one is the best.
2 problems... In the PDF doc, it says you must use stream to get the content of a specific user but the command is user !
Then I never found a way to sort images by more than one tag. If there's a way, I'll be more than happy to learn it !
One question though - is it possible to display Groups so that people contributing to a particular group can have all the photos displayed in a Joomla site.
Fantastic application though.
The only thing that erks me with this bot is that if you are displaying more than 100 photos on a page it takes a long time (about 2 minutes) to load. I was wondering if there is there going to be a fix for this? Then you would have the perfect flickr plugin for Joomla 1.5.
Thanks for all the hard work guys...
Unfortunately this issue is related to the response time of the Flickr API. However, enabling the cache function of the plugin can reduce loading time dramatically.
Just be aware that if you are loading a Flickr album with lots of images, your page may take a little longer to upload. However, this little inconvenience is compensated by the fact that you can access and customize any image from your Flick account, including the captions.
Getting all photo related information from the Flickr API can indeed slow down loading your page. Enabling the cache function of the plugin will make the plugin store the requested photo information locally, for the amount of time set in the plugin configuration. Upon re-requesting the page within the cache time boundary, it probably speeds up loading your page significantly.
We are currently running DOCman and the latest version of the plugin that can be downloaded on the website and do not experiencing any troubles with the combination of those two. If you like we could have look to see if we can help you out to see what’s the problem in your case. In that case, please contact us via our support forum.
About the Slimbox issue. Hacking into the Slimbox code to change the “rel” tag is on option. Another option, one that we will support in the next version of the plugin (v0.6), is a configuration option to select whether the slideshow javascript is embedded by the plugin. This way, upon using multiple plugins that utilize slimbox, the administrator is able to make sure the script is loaded only once. This feature can save bandwidth and makes the upgrading to a later version of slimbox a whole lot easier. ;-)
I was surpised how simple it was to install and use, given my experience with other photo gallery components/plug-ins.
It me 10 minutes to get it going once I downloaded it - and that includes logging on to Flickr to get my API key!
At the moment, only the image is accessible from Flickr.
In a future version, I'd like to see more options for handling the image metadata (tags, titles, etc.)
25-08-2008: The next version of the plugin (v0.6, to be released in the next few weeks) will support selections based on tags, group and user id's, next to the current photo and set options. ...and more selection options will follow in future releases. ;-)






