How to post large/fullsize Flickr photos to a weblog?

August 2, 2006 10:18 AM

Calling all Flickr ninjas: I would like to have Flickr send a large (750px+) version of my most recent photo to my weblog so I can use it as the banner. Is this possible?

I hope to be able to steadily freshen the look of my site by simply snapping a photo with my cellphone and emailing it up to Flickr. The idea is that I'll have a big banner DIV at the top of my weblog. The DIV's background (so it will crop nicely, if a bit randomly) will be my most recent Flickr upload.

Theoretically, I have a possible solution in mind (having Flickr automatically post to a separate Movable Type blog set up for the header image, and including that blog into my main blog). The problem seems to be that Flickr doesn't allow the posting of custom-sized photos -- I would prefer to tell it what width to publish, or at least to be able to publish a size larger than 500px.

Has anyone done anything like this before? Alternately, if there is a simple non-Flickr way to email photos from a cellphone to weblog, I'm all ears.

posted by redshifter to computers & internet (5 comments total)

You might have luck using the Flickr: Make a badge tool. Step through the wizard and pick the options that are closest to what you want and then tweak the resulting javascript. You could stick this bit of javascript where you want the banner to appear on your blog, and then when your blog is viewed, the image will be pulled from the Flickr site and displayed on the page.

(I think the Flickr terms of use require that any Flickr photo that is pulled from another site provide a link back to the original photo page on Flickr, so to be 100% legit you'll want to find a way to work that in.)

Alternately, if you're comfortable writing a little code, you could craft a custom solution using the Flickr API. For instance, set up a script to run every hour that downloads your most recent photo and puts it somewhere on your web server where your blog knows where to look for it.
posted by medpt at 10:44 AM on August 2, 2006

I'm sure someone could come up with a better way but one possibility is to bypass Flickr altogether and just set up your banner as moblog. This tutorial shows you how to use the MT-Moblog plugin to extract photos sent from your cellphone to a POP3 email account and post them to a separate blog. Use CSS to stretch the images to 750px and then integrate the moblog into the top of your blog as the header.
posted by junesix at 10:45 AM on August 2, 2006

Actually, I took a closer look, and the Flickr badge tool won't meet your requirements. It looks like the largest size photo it returns is 240 pixels wide. The Flickr API is much more flexible; it would let you access the original uploaded image.
posted by medpt at 10:58 AM on August 2, 2006

FLickr terms of use:

"Don't Use your account to host web graphics like logos and banners
Your account will be terminated if you use it to host graphic elements of web page designs, icons, smilies, buddy icons, forum avatars, badges and other non-photographic elements on external websites."

I think you can still do something like this, and I think it's a great idea, but I wouldn't call it a banner. Call it a rotating image or image of the week. And it must link back to flickr, as far as I understand.
posted by cda at 11:12 AM on August 2, 2006

Its pretty easy to grab the image from flickr using a regular expression, you might need to use imagemagick to format the picture into a banner for your site though.

I used to have a php script on my blog that would list the pictures uploaded that day next to the entry.
posted by mhuie at 1:58 PM on August 2, 2006