How to send phone pics to a spartan web site via Flickr?

December 20, 2009 12:16 PM

What's a minimal self-hosted "blog" that hooks into Flickr's API so I can send photos from my camera directly to my web site?

Ideally, I want a blog that is not a blog. I don't want tags, or articles, or categories, or spam filters, or any of that stuff. A perfect solution workflow would be this:

I take a picture with my phone
I send it to Flickr via e-mail
Flickr then posts it to my website with no interaction

The ideal layout would be a main site title, and each time I send a photo it appears as the newest one, using the title I typed. There would be maybe 10 photos on the main page. You could access earlier photos by clicking "older" or something like that which would serve as the archives.

I can do this with wordpress, movable type, typepad, etc., but they are all way too huge feature-wise and not what I want. I can also do this with blogger or tumblr, but they are not self-hosted. I tried this recently with textpattern, but the templates and general admin are much too complicated for my needs.

It should be very simple, aesthetics-wise. You could maybe change the color scheme / typography via CSS, but that's about it.

Does something like this exist? For the Flickr hook-in it needs to be a MetaWeblogAPI Enabled Blog or other Flickr-approved application.

Thanks for any suggestions.

posted by ehamiter to computers & internet (11 answers total)

A tumblog will do what you ask with little to no effort. Hosted, free, easy, skinnable.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:30 PM on December 20, 2009

Posterous
posted by jgirl at 12:32 PM on December 20, 2009

Seconding Tumblr. Pretty much exactly what you're looking for.
posted by bradbane at 12:43 PM on December 20, 2009

Chyrp with the "Aggregator Module" might work.
posted by bluefly at 12:48 PM on December 20, 2009

Ehamiter clearly favors a self-hosted solution and has already dismissed tumblr on that score.

Chyrp looks cool. It doesn't look like the Aggregator Module is necessary since the core seems to support the metaweblog API
posted by Good Brain at 1:04 PM on December 20, 2009

Tumblr would be perfect if I could host it myself. Same for posterous.

Chyrp looks cool, checking it out now.
posted by ehamiter at 1:04 PM on December 20, 2009

Chyrp looks like it fits the bill nicely. Thanks!
posted by ehamiter at 1:43 PM on December 20, 2009

I know you've decided to go with Chyrp, but I'll note that Tumblr will let you use a custom domain, and they just released a full blog export, so you're able to keep an offsite copy of your content. So in case someone finds this down the road and isn't as concerned with hosting it themselves, Tumblr is terrific.
posted by Alt F4 at 2:26 PM on December 20, 2009

The free version of TypePad will do this, without any tags, etc. But why do you need to have Flickr involved, is that a requisite?
posted by anildash at 2:44 PM on December 20, 2009

This isn't exactly what you're after in terms of layout, but Flogr might be worth a look.

It's a self-hosted (PHP/MySQL) photo portfolio thing that uses your photos hosted on Flickr.

I have no connection to it -- I haven't even used it -- but the demo site looks good.
posted by fabius at 2:55 PM on December 20, 2009

I have looked into TypePad as well, and just don't like the interface. It may work awesome for others, though.

Flogr actually looks very cool. If I hadn't discovered Chyrp, I would give this a go.

Many, many thanks for the discovery of Chyrp. It actually is everything that I wanted- the layout, ease of use, and aesthetics jive perfectly with the functionality that I wanted.
posted by ehamiter at 3:30 PM on December 20, 2009