Why you should use Flickr

It’s been a long while since I last posted anything – doing NYC hours for work can really take its toll on you. But during the day, when not doing errands, or hanging out with my girlfriend (or sleeping). I’ve been tweaking nargalzius.com quite a bit.

Of course a lot of other stuff has happened but lets save those for another day. This time I just want to pimp Flickr after something I recently did with my site.

Just recently, I finally convinced myself to sign-up with Flickr‘s premium membership to lift the limitations of the free service (infinite upload bandwidth and collection/set creation, etc.).

Now I’ve always had the preference to use Flickr for all my picture needs. After all, even the free service they have already has pleny-a-benefit if you want to have reliable image hosting that can embedded anywhere. I even didn’t mind the premium membership price because it was well worth it.

The only reason I didn’t go all-Flickr was because for a “personal gallery,” I really wanted people accessing it through my domain and have the layout/design gel with my sites overall theme. Hence, I used to have a separate gallery for my actual photo sets. And just used Flickr as a general repository for images I use for blog posts. Read More

Lightboxing and Flickr

NOTICE
CONTENTS NO LONGER APPLICABLE

The content discussed in this post is no longer valid; as I’m now using a different “lightbox” implementation.
More here

JC made me check out his installation of a cool WordPress plugin that does lightboxing. I decided to apply the same stuff in my blog – and modify it a bit to be able to link to the image’s Flickr page somewhat dynamically.

Results

If you’re not interested in the details, then just spot the difference between these two lightbox-enabled links (I just hope it does work as I intended it to).

Here’s an image which I linked to Flickr

Here’s an image which I linked to the Gallery within my domian

LINK REMOVED (as the old gallery doesn’t exist anymore)

If you noticed the difference, and are interested in how I did that – read on… Read More

Flickr-ized

I decided to maximize the use of Flickr as an image repository specifically for my blog. While it would be nice to just move the entire gallery to Flickr, I really don’t like the idea of not being able to skin it (and that the gallery’s URL will be outside of my domain). I’m not sure if they have an API released that allows a fully blown gallery to be created outside of their servers, but for now it’s not an option for me.

I finally finished editing each and every entry to fix the broken image links after I moved everything to Flickr. And while modifying the posts, I realized some things that may be useful in case you guys didn’t know it yet. One cool thing about Flickr is that stores its images statically, which allows you to do some legitimate hotlinking to [your] images in the Flickr server from virtually anywhere.

The drawback was that you had to do a decent amount of clicking before you can get to the “static URL” field of the file… at least that’s what I experienced until now. This post is just a discussion on how to access and use those static URLs quickly and efficiently for your hotlinking needs. Read More