For a period of around 4 months between November 2010 and February 2011 the Flickr API had some performance issues which meant that it would return a “no photos available message” when its servers were overloaded. This problem did not affect Flickr RSS feeds.
To get around this problem Slickr Flickr Pro has an automatic recovery feature so when it gets no photos via the FLickr API it then switches over and tries to fetch photos using the RSS feed.
This means that instead of no photos being returned the RSS feed can fetch up to 20 photos – the idea being that 20 photos are better than none.
This feature requires no configuration: it works by default for Slickr Flickr Pro.
However, if you wish to disable this feature, then add use_key=”y” to the Slickr Flickr command as this forces Slickr Flickr to use the API and the failover to Flickr RSS will not happen.