Slickr Flickr Pro allows you to establish an authenticated connection to Flickr and this allows you to fetch private as well as public photos.
You might want to use this feature on a membership site or on password protected posts.
The following two requests are to fetch all the photos in a photoset that has 4 photos where 1 photo is public and the other 3 are private.
Public Photos With Descriptions and Links
slickr-flickr search="sets" set="72157623426000518" descriptions="on" flickr_link="on"
Private Photos
slickr-flickr search="sets" set="72157623426000518" descriptions="on" flickr_link="on" private="on"
Note that when you try and click the Flickr link in the lightbox it will fail for the 3 private photos. This demonstrates how you can make private photos available to your WordPress site.
How Does Flickr Authentication Work?
This feature uses the new Flickr Open Authentication regime which involves two pairs of keys, where one key is public and the other is private.
- a consumer key (a.k.a. Flickr API key), a consumer secret (a.k.a. Flickr Secret);
- an access token (a.k.a. Flickr Authentication Token), an access token secret (a.k.a. Flickr Authentication Token Secret);
The consumer key and authentication token are passed in each request and the request is signed with a signature that is created using the two secrets and the parameters in the request. The secrets themselves are never transmitted.
Flickr also ‘knows’ the secrets so it can calculate the signature and if this matches the signature on the request then the request is authenticated.
The following diagram shows how Open Authentication generates the Access Token. Enjoy!
Open Authentication Flows