Integrating flickr photos with your website gallery - solution

m_stan

I've had a personal website for a long time, and had my own custom photo gallery that all my friends and family would visit. Then I started using flickr and got hooked in its social networking side. This meant that I was maintaining two photo galleries, and my personal website ended up suffering.

I was looking for a photo gallery that used the flickr api to integrate my website with my flickr account, and I've found on and it rocks.

All your hosting provider needs is PHP5 and MySQL.

Takes about 10 mins to configure and get going.

Here's a link to download it. Here's how it looks on my site after I did some stylesheet customisations (to make the background white instead of black). Here's how it looks with the default black style.

Hope that helps some of you that use both flickr and a personal website photo gallery. It took me a while to come across.

Fenster

Very nice, alas that I forget what the FTP password for my site is so I can't upload anything.

mikeanywhere

Great pics on your site, the only thin I would say is:

1. Not have the comments showing, why
2. If you have a visitor to the site who doesnt know about Flickr etc they would expect to be able to leave a message in similar format too

FreeAnd..

something similar to what i have done on my own site (http://thetrueview.com). I do agree about the comments though..it can be a bit confusing unless you provide access to comment on flickr through your website. Easy enough to do through the api but would require authorization (i.e. the user to have a flickr account or you could securitize your own but then it would appear as if you were commenting on your own pics)

m_stan

Yes I agree - this system has its downsides, but for me it gets around more problems than it leaves outstanding. My main issue was having to maintain two sets of galleries, and my site visitors not being able to see my photos because they dont know about my flickr.

I have my two audiences - my flickr contacts can continue to see my flickr uploads, and my website visitors get to see it all too, and I only have to update on one site.

Fenster

I personally use Wordpress with the awesome Lightbox plugin, and made sure to link back to my Flickr page from my blog so people will know.

lumis

Hi i was going through my server logs and noticed a few visits from this thread
anyway if you guys have any ideas on how i can improve lumisGallery let me know after reading this i plan on adding a direct link to post a comment in flickr i need to fix some IE6 css issues with the comments anyway

obviously the visitor would need a flickr acct to post the comment but short of using the api to verify each user i cant think of a better way. also i am going to ad a switch to turn off comments

m_stan

Hi Lumis. Firstly well done on lumisgallery. It's really slick and has saved me a lot of time and bother by doing all the hard work for me !

Some suggestions from someone who just set this up a few days ago -

More configuration options would be cool - Allow for configurable thumbnail sizes, columns and rows per gallery page, and most importantly from my perspective - a choice of styles. My website has a whote background and though your black css is really slick and looks fantastic, I wanted to stick with the theme of my site, so I needed to do some big updates to css and the background images. If you took some basic website colour schemes and created a downloadable configurable set of styles, it would add a lot of flexibility to the gallery.

Once again thanks for your efforts, and its great to see you checking your logs and getting involved in the debate.

Hugh_C

Thanks m_stan for bringing this to our attention. If anyone could be bothered, I've implemented it on my site here. Haven't fiddled with ot enough to make any suggestions but a BIG THANK YOU to lumis for putting in so much effort.

Thanks,

Hugh

m_stan

savage shots hugh. class stuff. lumisgallery is great innit ? so easy to setup. enjoy

tr33lo

I cant get this to work properly on my website

Can anyone out there help me?


www.improvedimage.co.uk

thanks in advance Jon.

lumis

m_stan
the configurable thumnails well the size is set by flickr there system automaticly creates several sizes when you upload your image
no processing is done on your server side which i think is a big benifit

here is how flickr does it

s small square 75x75
t thumbnail, 100 on longest side
m small, 240 on longest side
- medium, 500 on longest side

you can change which size is displayed by default in the inc_config.php file then your users
have the option to sort the size or date/intersting on there own if you enable that feature

// default size of the pictures on the pictures page 0=square 1=thumb 2=medium
$picturesSize = "0";

the "-" size is only displayed on the photos main page picture.php
also each size has the option of how many to display per page

$picturessquarePerPage = "25";
$picturesthumbPerPage = "20";
$picturesmediumPerPage = "8";

by changing this and vering the width of your .photosblock {} class in your lumisGallery.css
you can very the columns and rows of your displayed pictures. I did it this way
because it allows for more flexability in your layout and less code. in fact you
can compleatley change all of the layout by just altering the the css file. and forgive me but
i build websites all day so css is a bit of a daily thing for me. i know at first glance it can look like allot of stuff
but i think this is pretty flexable.

also i have tried to leave alot of the div structure in the individual template file pictures.php sets.php etc.
this way you can further re-arrange that stuff the way you like

however i would like to build several base css templates to choose from just not sure when i would get around to that.

chears

m_stan

Thanks for the feedback lumis.

tr33lo wrote:

I cant get this to work properly on my website

Can anyone out there help me?


www.improvedimage.co.uk

thanks in advance Jon.

Jon - looks like all is working fine now.

tr33lo

Thanks for checking but It's not, I did manage to get the first page to load but if you click on the all sets link or the next button no pictures show up?

and now i cant even get the first page
http://www.improvedimage.co.uk//pictures.php/page1/
to load properly!!!

I guess i have missed something but i cant see it

m_stan

When I clicked on the first link earlier it worked.

All I can suggest is you delete the database table and setup the config file again and re-upload. Essentially, start again. Took me just a few mins to get this going so if you ensure you sign up for all the api keys, and fill in every config file entry and upload, you should be good to go.

tr33lo

I have done all that and it would seem that the script isnt getting the flickr information? Im at a loss as to what has gone wrong

lumis

tr33lo
my first guess would be that you got some bad data from flickr or your database craped out during the write. first thing go and download the new version i just uploaded. if that does not fix your problem try and use file system caching rather than mySQL if you are still having problems i added a clean cache feature to this version and a error reporting so we can see what is going on

tr33lo

Thanks for your repsponse Lumis

I have downloaded the new version. I tried to use the Directory structure instead of mysql but it still didnt work, I then created a new mysql database and ran the showerrors thing, and the resulting errors were:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/improvedimage.co.uk/httpdocs/core/core.setsrail.php on line 5

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/improvedimage.co.uk/httpdocs/core/core.pictures.php on line 54

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/improvedimage.co.uk/httpdocs/core/core.functions.php on line 148

Warning: Wrong parameter count for max() in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/improvedimage.co.uk/httpdocs/core/core.functions.php on line 153

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/improvedimage.co.uk/httpdocs/core/core.functions.php on line 157

is this the information you required or is there something else?

Thanks in advance
Jon

lumis

tr33lo i have to admit i am at a loss on this one i was hoping i would see some gleaming erreor that told me what was going on but all these errors say is that you are not getting data from flickr.
also did you update every file i noticed some of the redirects were not doing what they should..
I loaded your username on my test server and all your pictures loaded fine if you want we can trouble shoot this further over e-mail so we dont boar everyone else with this

tr33lo

WOOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!!!

Ok Lumis thanks for your help but it was all down to me being a dumbass!!

the problem was caused by a missing .htaccess file which i have now sorted out and your fantastic gallery now works like a charm

I'm really sorry that i caused this problem, but I am sooo glad it's now sorted, thank you so much for time and effort

Jon

m_stan

jon - your photos are savage !

tr33lo

Thanks It all worked ok then I'm glad you liked them!!

One thing i have noticed:

when i choose a photo i have geotagged (in flickr) it shows up on the page with the map at the bottom of the screen and the pointer! but when i use the mapped page no arrows or anything show on the map?

is this a known problem, or have i done something wrong again

Jon