Where can I get a RSS feed for photos that's NOT flickr to put on my blog?

November 10, 2005 3:46 PM

As a pretty prolific photographer and new blogger, I want to make my photos an important part of my Typepad basic blog. I'm looking for some kind of service that will let me upload my photos and then create some kind of (ideal) RSS feed or (less ideal) HTML code that I can put on my blog to show the 20 most recent photos or so. I need control over the feed or code to make the thumbnails or images the size I want to fit in the design. I've tried flickr and I'm less than impressed by the inability to change the size of the photos in the feed. I don't want to use a flickr badge - I want the user to see all the photos as they read my blog entries. I'd also like to prevent having large amounts of added "ads" on top of my photos advertising the service I'm using to provide the photos.

The reason I'm looking for RSS is that I'd like to be able to set it up and not have to mess with it later. So when I upload new pictures, my blog will automatically update itself with the new photos. I'm open to other suggestions on how to accomplish something like this using a different method than RSS. If it comes down to it, I suppose I can handle manually changing the page, but it needs to be pretty simple (eg: copy and paste a page of text from one web page into my blog sidebar).

posted by riverjack to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I haven't used it, but Zoto looks very Flickr-like, gives you RSS feeds, and apparently let you specify custom dimensions.
posted by designbot at 4:29 PM on November 10, 2005

I use Planet to combine my blog entries, del.icio.us links, and flickr photos into a single stream. [Self-link]
posted by Plutor at 6:17 PM on November 10, 2005

SlideShowPro looks great, and can be customized to do all kinds of things -- maybe it can do something you'd like? it can load photos from Flickr as well, so you'll be able to regain control of sizing.
posted by jruckman at 2:10 AM on November 11, 2005

Although Typepad is a fine service, I don't believe they give you the option of running other scripts. This limits your options considerably. If you set up your blog with a host that allows you to run scripts you upload, your options widen considerably.

Taking flickr, for example: they actually have a complete API that is used in libraries for just about every scripting language you'd be likely to use. So if you could upload a PHP (or python, or perl, or whatever) script, you'd be able to fine-tune exactly the way you wanted to suck down and display your flickr photos. Here's a php script for flickr based on the "phlickr" library. Here's a list of interesting flickr tools.

Another option would be the popular Gallery package. This would be for self-hosted images, but gives you a lot of control if you're willing to dive in. There are other CMSs with photo-album features as well.

As it is, with Typepad, you need to customize the photo output before it ever "gets to" Typepad and have it dropped in ready to go. My own feeling is that Typepad is not the best choice for your needs for this reason.
posted by adamrice at 7:15 AM on November 11, 2005