How To Use Slickr Flickr Admin Settings

by Russell 73 Comments

How to Set Up The Plugin Defaults

If you don’t want to specify all the settings for every slideshow or gallery you can set up some defaults as follows:

  1. Go to the “Settings” section, and choose “Slickr Flickr”
  2. Enter your Flickr Id (the id of the form 12345678@N00)
  3. Fetch and save your Flickr API Key (required if you want to fetch more than 20 photos)
  4. Enter a Slickr Flickr Pro License Key (required if you want to use bonus features such as fetching more than 50 photos)
  5. You can also change the default settings for
    • the number of photos to show
    • the type of display – gallery, slideshow or gallery/slideshow combo
    • whether photos captions are displayed
    • what the delay in seconds is before the slideshow moves on to the next slide
    • what LightBox you want to use for the gallery

How to Find Your Flickr ID

You can find you Flickr ID as follows:

  1. Log in to Flickr account at http://flickr.com
  2. Click the You link to your photostream
  3. Copy the URL in the address bar of your browser
  4. Go To idgettr.com
  5. Paste into the Photstream Address and click Find
  6. Copy the ID that appears below omitting the ID: bit
  7. Paste your Flickr Id in the Slickr Flickr Admin settings
  8. Only if the account is a group and not a user, set the type to Group
  9. Click Save Changes

Updated by .

Comments

  2. Roman says

    Hola Russell.
    El plugin ha dejado de funcionar por si sólo. No se ha cambiado nada de la configuración que tenía y ahora no muestra ninguna fotografía. Sale siempre el mensaje: No photos available right now.
    Please verify your settings, clear your RSS cache on the Slickr Flickr Admin page and check your Flickr feed

    He borrado la caché, desinstalado e instalado de nuevo y no hay ahora manera de que funcione.
    ¿Qué ha podido ocurrir?
    Tengo la versión 2.5.4 y la 4.3.1 de WordPress
    ——————————————————————
    Hello Russell.
    The plugin has stopped working by itself. It has not changed any of the settings you had and now shows no picture. Always get the message: No photos available right now.
    Please verify your settings, clear your cache on the Slickr RSS Admin Flickr page and check your Flickr feed

    I deleted the cache, uninstalled and reinstalled and no way it will work now.
    What could have happened?

    Román.

  3. Russell says

    Desiree,
    The link you supplied above works when clicked.

    What is the link that does not work? Just copy this from your website, or better still provide the URL of the page that has the error.

  4. Desiree Krummenacher says

    I am getting the following error:

    Error fetching Flickr photos: A feed could not be found at http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?lang=en-us&format=feed-rss_200&g=61853521@N00&tags=dogs&per_page=5. A feed with an invalid mime type may fall victim to this error, or SimplePie was unable to auto-discover it.. Use force_feed() if you are certain this URL is a real feed.

    I’m using the tag you show above as a test.

    Can you help me?

    Thank you.

    Desirée

  5. Russell says

    Yes, please update. Slickr FLickr requires at least WordPress 3.0.

    WordPress is now running 3.8.1. Running an old version of WordPress, such as 2.9.2 which is just over 4 years old, exposes you to security risks as well as causing incompatibilities with plugins that use new WordPress features.

  6. Dave Carr says

    Hi Russell, thanks for your reply about using the wordpress admin section add my Flickr ID, when I click on Slickr Flickr in Settings I just get

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_current_screen() in /home/mydlp/public_html/admin/wp-content/plugins/slickr-flickr/slickr-flickr-admin.php on line 58

    I am running WordPress 2.9.2 should I update?

  8. Dave Carr says

    Hi Russell, new to flickr and medium knowledge of wordpress. Having trouble following your installation instructions. For example where exactly to paste my Flickr ID, in my WordPress Plugin settings/edit I can see

    Where exactly should it go?

    Also where you sat add “my tag phrase” can you add more than one tag separated by commas?

    Like one of your other queries I could really do with a simple step by step guide, thanks David

  9. Russell says

    Hi Angela,

    I am currently working on a pagination feature to allow you more control of how the access requests are broken down. This will allow the first say 30 photos to be shown, with the user able to navigate in chunks of 30, or whatever you set the ‘chunk’ size to.

    Here are a few policy statements from Yahoo/Flickr which give some guidelines on usage.

    The Usage policy given at http://developer.yahoo.com/flickr/ is

    RATE LIMITS

    Use of the Flickr developer service should not exceed reasonable request volume. Access through YQL is limited to 20,000 signed calls per hour and 2,000 unsigned calls per hour, as defined in the YQL Terms of Use. If you believe your application will exceed such volume, please contact us.

    That was a more General Yahoo policy.

    Another statement from Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/services/developer/api/ is

    Limits: Since the Flickr API is quite easy to use, it’s also quite easy to abuse, which threatens all services relying on the Flickr API. To help prevent this, we limit the access to the API per key. If your application stays under 3600 queries per hour across the whole key (which means the aggregate of all the users of your integration), you’ll be fine. If we detect abuse on your key, we will need to expire the key, or turn it off, in order to preserve the Flickr API functionality for others (including us!). We also track usage on other factors as well to ensure no API user abuses the system

    The above suggests a limit of around 1 access per second

    The Flickr API Terms of Service in clause 1 b iii) at http://www.flickr.com/services/api/tos/ states

    You shall not display more than 30 Flickr user photos per page in your application or use an unreasonable amount of bandwidth.

    Clearly 30 thumbnails is different from 30 full size photos but each is still a separate API call. However, due to caching it is likely that only the first time each page is access (in each 12 hour window) do the API calls take place.

    The caching means that lots of users regularly use more than 30 thumbnails per page without hitting any limit.

    It is therefore likely that the “unreasonable amount of bandwidth” test has been applied to your client.

    Perhaps the combination of uploading 200 photos and then having them accessed immediately might have tipped the limit?

  10. Angela DeBernardo says

    Hi –

    I’ve been using your Pro plugin for years and love it. Recently, a client has uploaded in excess of 200 photos with the tag used for display for her frontpage slideshow. The next day, the site was shutdown temporarily for overusage of CPU by my host. Is that just coincidence? I am trying to determine if there is a “best practice” for the number of photos fetched from flickr for a single slideshow or if it really doesn’t matter. I realize that few people will be able to see all 200 photos on the slideshow, but the client doesn’t want to pick certain photos over others to be on display. She wants them all.

  12. Rick says

    Hey there,

    Thanks for a nice plugin. The description says you can choose to display the photo’s description… I’m only seeing where to show or hide photo captions. Can you direct me to the description area?

    Thanks,
    Rick

  14. Russell says

    Hi Scott,

    You need to deactivate Slickr Flickr and then log in to the membership site and download, upload and activate Slickr Flickr Pro.

    You will then see a Pro Section under Slickr Flickr settings

  15. Scott Coburn says

    Hello,
    I just purchased the Pro license (annual) and I can’t find on the WP admin, under the Slickr Flickr Settings, where to enter the Pro license key? Can you please advise where I am to enter the Pro key in WordPress?

    Thanks!
    Scott

  17. Tim Helmer says

    I had to delete the spaces from my tags for it to work. It would be nice to have it link to the attachment page first then to flicker (page not image). That way I can handle the discussion on an image by image basis.

  18. Sharvin Whitted says

    Error fetching Flickr photos: WP HTTP Error: couldn’t connect to host

    I’ll check with Godaddy as well

  19. Russell says

    Sharvin,

    Please try connecting to a different Flickr account as a test: use [slickr-flickr id="61853521@N00" items="5" type="gallery" tag="dogs"]

    This should establish whether the problem lies with your host/firewall or your Flickr account.

  20. Sharvin Whitted says

    actually im getting the same 2 errors still.. i can’t figure out when or what is causing the different error.

  21. Sharvin Whitted says

    I am getting:
    Error fetching Flickr photos: WP HTTP Error: couldn’t connect to host

  22. Russell says

    Two possibilities: could be a server issue at Flickr or maybe a firewall issue at your host.

    To verify which it is: set the number of photos to something low: items=”10″ and see what happens.

  23. Sharvin Whitted says

    Thanks, Russell

    I extended it, and now get two other errors:

    1st – Error fetching Flickr photos: WP HTTP Error: Empty reply from server
    2nd – Error fetching Flickr photos: WP HTTP Error: couldn’t connect to host

  26. Russell says

    James, you would need to open up port 80 for outbound connections so Slickr Flickr can connect back to Flickr to fetch the photos.

  27. James says

    Hello,
    I am trying to use your plugin on a blog that lives behind a proxy, is there a way to give the proxy details to the plugin to get it to work?

    Thanks,
    James

  28. Russell says

    This typically means that either you have a typo in the slickr-flickr command or your photos are not yet publicly available.

    The Flickr Feed in the message is a link, what happens when your click the link? What slickr-flickr command are you using?

  29. Melanie says

    Hi,
    I’ve typed in everything correctly on the Admin page, but still get this error: Please verify your settings, clear your RSS cache on the Slickr Flickr Admin page and check your Flickr feed.

    Do you know what’s wrong? Thanks!
    My id: 66722903@N02
    version: 1.37

  33. Web Hosting says

    I want to enter my Flickr ID on the Slickr Flickr settings page but unfortunately I don’t see any save button and therefore my Flickr ID or any other settings I change don’t get saved… What is the problem here?

  34. Russell says

    Hi Maury

    The most likely problem is that you have the wrong type of quotes (or mismatched quotes) around the word shop.

    Try deleting the quotes and retyping them again

    Regards

    Russell

  35. Maury Loomis says

    I have tagged some photos with the tag “shop”.

    But the all the images keep appearing, not just those tagged with shop?

    I used this tag:

    slickr-flickr tag=”shop”

    What am I doing wrong? I just want the images with tag shop!

    Thanks!

  37. Ilona Sturm says

    Hi Russel, below is one slickr-flickr command I’ve been using for one of the sets. I reverted back to taking out the ascending etc. because I thought that’s what killed the descriptions. My flickr id is: 6165659 and my url is: http://www.IlonaSturm.com. While I have your attention, though I love slickr-flickr, I simply can’t figure out how the heck to create the ‘parent’ groups. I want to create sub-categories for the types of art that I do. Also, I’m unclear whether in my flickr descriptions I can include a text PLUS the 01., 02. etc. Also, for the tag, do I include slickr-flickr PLUS my ordinary flickr subject tags. I want a pretty straight-forward static art gallery type site. Thanks so much and how can I continue to learn how to improve my site on my own? Where does the code exist to bring my sidebar items – Drawings etc. over to the left? How can I make the ‘child’ sub-categories smaller with scroll-over changes? I’m new to WP so excuse me if these questions are not your domain. Thanks a gazillion for slickr-flickr!!!!

    [slickr-flickr type="galleria" search="sets" autoplay="off" set="72157626507816895 "]

     

  39. Ilona Sturm says

    Hi. I’m working with trying to get my images in the proper order through the flickr ‘sets’ and just when I think I figured it out, it seems to have wiped out all my ‘descriptions’ which is important to understand the artwork. They’re still there within the flickr site. Any idea why they’re not showing up on the website? Thanks!

  40. Steph says

    Hi Russell

    Thanks and yes that’s correct. The problem tag is “cardcompetition”, but the interesting thing is that it works for you, so maybe the rendering problem is theme-related. I’d have guessed that the issue was the number of items being returned for that tag, except for the fact that setting the items parameter makes no difference. Perhaps it’ll become clearer with a bit more experimentation. 🙂

    Steph

  41. Russell says

    Hi Steph,

    Glad it is working now.

    If I understand you correctly, the problem only occurred when you were using a specific tag? Is that correct? Which tag was it?

  42. Steph says

    Hi Russell

    Thanks very much again. The closing quote on the id tag did look wrong, so I retyped the whole shortcode, and the page still wouldn’t render. So then I experimented with different tags, and I found that the problem only occurs with one particular tag, regardless of whether or not the number of items is restricted. So the cause of the problem is still mysterious, but most importantly, I can now display some images! Your help was greatly appreciated.

    Best regards

    Steph

  43. Russell says

    Sorry Steph, I missed that.

    With group=”y” it works fine for me:

    slickr-flickr tag=”cardcompetition” type=”gallery” id=”1635386@N23″ group=”y”

    Are you sure there was not a missing quote or a left/opening quote rather than a standard double or anything like that?

    If nothing at all is displayed it is typically a typo and WordPress is unable to parse the shortcode correctly.

    It looks to me that the closing quote at the end of the id field is of the wrong type

  44. Steph says

    Hi Russell

    Thanks, however as I mentioned, when I add group = “y” my page won’t display at all.

    If I edit the URL and look at it directly then there is a feed: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?lang=en-us&format=feed-rss_200&&group_id=1635386@N23&tags=cardcompetition&per_page=18

    But if I use the following shortcode, the page won’t render. Does it work for you?

    slickr-flickr tag=”cardcompetition” type=”gallery” id=”1635386@N23″ group=”y”

    Steph

  46. Steph says

    Hi Russell,

    When I try to override my default Flickr ID (which is for a user account) with another ID (for a group account) by setting the id attribute inside the shortcode, then I get this error:

    Error fetching Flickr photos: A feed could not be found at http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?lang=en-us&format=feed-rss_200&&id=1635386@N23&tags=cardcompetition&per_page=18

    But if I set that same group ID as my default ID in Settings, then I can display the feed, so is it fair to assume this can’t be a permissions issue? I am sure that the group is public.

    Incidentally if I set the group attribute with the value ‘y’ inside the shortcode, then the page won’t display at all. It seems to create some sort of markup syntax error.

    In case it’s relevant I’m using version 1.28.

    Thanks for your time, and your great plugin,

    Steph

  48. Russell says

    HI Adam,

    Flickr is returning no photos. Click the link associated with the message – if there are no “items” in the feed then Flickr has not yet made your photos publicly available, either because it has not yet synchronized its servers for your photos or because you have marked the photos as private.

    If you see photos on the feed but not in WordPress then follow the instructions to clear the WordPress RSS cache which makes WordPress go back to Flickr to get the latest feed

  49. Adam says

    I also have the error “Please verify your settings, clear your RSS cache on the Slickr Flickr Admin page and check your Flickr feed”. However, I’m on version 1.28.

  50. Russell says

    Hi Rylan,

    I will look into why this is not the case and fix in the next release which I will do this weekend.

    Thanks for pointing this out

    Regards

    Russell

  51. Rylan says

    Hi Russell

    For some reason WordPress is not picking up that my 1.25 version is NOT the latest version and will not allow me to update.

    Do I have to manually update it?

    Many thanks

    Rylan

  55. Monil says

    Hi Russell,

    Greetings for the day.

    I am currently using version 1.16 of Slickr Flicker, for my Gallery page.

    ~ The slideshow is not visible and it shows the error message:
    Error fetching Flickr photos: A feed could not be found at http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&lang=en-us&format=feed-rss_200&api_key=ab1429c243033e7bfc59a1de39048026&user_id=34661798@N04&tags=coorg, bangalore,karwar,sunrise,sunset,

    I thought that problem might have happened due to not upgrading to new version. So I moved to version 1.27 after receiving the mail from you.
    But the still the same problem persists even after updating to version 1.27. So again I moved to version 1.16. I am facing still the same problem and not able to fix above mentioned issue.

    I have also cleared the cache by using the Slikr Flikr admin page.

    Kindly let me know how can I get the images again.

    Flickr ID: 34661798@N04
    URL: http://monildalal.com/?page_id=11

    Regards,
    Monil

  58. Bill says

    I noticed today I’m getting this error:

    Error fetching Flickr photos: A feed could not be found at
    http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?lang=en-us&format=feed-rss_200&&id=25250702@n05&tags=20110313&per_page=20

    When I navigate to the tag’s page and click the RSS I can see the feed:

    http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=25250702@N05&tags=20110313&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

    Am I missing something? This was all working fine a few days ago. (I updated to WP 3.1.1 today, but it was not working before that update either.)

  59. Russell says

    I investigated the page http://www.slickrflickr.com/2270/flickr-galleria-slide-transitions-now-supported-by-slickr-flickr/ which has a medium size galleria, a medium 640 galleria, a small slideshow and a small gallery.

    The investigation shows the image file is requested twice by the galleria; the first causes the file to be fetched and returns HTTP status 200 OK; and on the second request the server returns 304 Not Modified which is telling the browser that it already has the file. So the physical file is only being sent once.

    To improve performance you may want to use compression and also set expiry headers on images. Here is the code that needs to be placed in your .htaccess file


    <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/plain text/xml image/x-icon
    </IfModule>
    <IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 3 days"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 7 days"
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 7 days"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 30 days"
    ExpiresByType image/bmp "access plus 30 days"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 30 days"
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 30 days"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 30 days"
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 30 days"
    </IfModule>

  60. Russell says

    Hi Richard,

    Thanks for that great question. Are you using the galleria? The slideshows and gallery do not do any scaling but the galleria does.

    In the galleria you have the big photo and the thumbnail beneath the big photo is created as a scaled image. I think it is relatively inexpensive to produce the thumbnail if it needs the big photo anyway – I do not believe the same large photo is being fetched twice – it is most likely being fetched once and then displayed at full size and at the scaled size. So I believe that the Google tool may be misreporting because it is assuming the large version of the photo is being fetched twice

    I will do some investigations to try and prove whether one or two fetches are taking place.

    In the unlikely event the browser is in fact fetching the big image twice, then is should be possible to modify the galleria code (it is a open source jquery plugin) to use the ‘square’ 75x75px image from flickr so no resizing is required.

  61. richard says

    Hi Russell,

    I am using flickrslickr on our website. Today I tried the new google tool http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/ to see how fast Google thinks our pages are. And the result is BAD … this has nothing to do with your plugin (I think).

    This google tool comes back with suggestions, and one of them is the following:

    ++++++++++++++++++
    The following images are resized in HTML or CSS. Serving scaled images could save 1.7MiB (94% reduction).
    http://farm5.static.flickr.com/…/5208433103_2a47ae0f30.jpg is resized in HTML or CSS from 497×500 to 80×80. Serving a scaled image could save 182.8KiB (97% reduction).
    ++++++++++++++++++

    Can you help me with HOW / WHERE I can make this reduction happen? Is this something that needs to be done in Flickr itself? If so, do I need to upload new images, which would not make sense to me? Or is there another place I need to deal with this within Flickr. OR is it something that needs to be taken care off within SlickrFlickr?

    Thanks for your help

    Richard

  63. ivy says

    “No photos available right now.
    Please verify your settings, clear your RSS cache on the Slickr Flickr Admin page and check your Flickr feed”

    This is the response that Im getting on my website….how do I fix?

    Here’s my flickr id: 57945647@N05
    Here’s my website: http://www.ibffnashville.com

  65. A Blogger says

    Can’t get the plugin to show more than 20 pics despite having all the setting correct.

  68. Mike says

    Hi Russell,

    Im having the same problem as the others.

    My test post has the following shortcode – [slickr-flickr tag="test"]

    When I preview the post Iget the following;

    Error fetching Flickr RSS feed: A feed could not be found at http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?lang=en-us&format=feed-rss_200&id=highlyfavouredltd_&tagmode=all&tags=test

    but, my test image is displayed perfectly at the url below;

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/highlyfavouredltd_/tags/test

    Any ideas, I see your app being very useful in my work.

    Thanks,
    Mike

  69. Russell says

    Arne just happened to be using the wrong Flickr ID so the solution might not be the same.

    Please let me know you Flickr ID, the tag you are are using and the URL of the page you are using it on?

  72. Arne says

    Thanks Russell, for your wonderful application.

    I need some help to find my error. Regardless of what I try, I get “No photos available for stgr”, “stgr” being my tag.
    So I tried
    [slickr-flickr type="slideshow" id="21879932@N02" tag="stgr"]
    [slickr-flickr type="slideshow" id="48295685@N06" tag="myexpresssite"]
    I get a “No photos available for stgr” and only the “myexpresssite” shows up.
    Where should I start looking? Thanks a bunch for your time.

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