Displaying more than 20 items in my Flickr feed

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

By default, Flickr only displays 20 items in a feed. I wanted to display everything, so I started to dig around in the API. Reading a Flickr forum post gave me the idea of using the Flickr API to pull out the contents of my Photostream so, after applying for an API key, I tried out the following URL:

http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=myapikey&per_page=500&format=feed-rss_200&user_id=myuserid

You can start to get an idea of the various parameters in the Flickr API explorer but it seems that the per_page limit is 50. Even so, by adding a &page=pagenumber to the URL, I can return the next page of results:

http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=myapikey&per_page=500&format=feed-rss_200&user_id=myuserid&page=2

Now all I need to do is work out how to cycle through all the pages and string them together to produce a feed with all of my images in it.

5 thoughts on “Displaying more than 20 items in my Flickr feed”

  1. Mark,

    Not sure if you’ve messed around with this since June or not, but I recently just started playing around with JSON to pull my images from Flickr. I haven’t tried your method yet but I am going to tinker around with it tonight. I too would like to pull all of my sets and get them into one large grid. Unfortunately though right now I am using several javascript files for each photo set. If you’re looking for a script to string them all together I may be able to help you out there. Shoot me an email if you’re interested.

    Dylan

  2. Hi Mark,

    This was exactly what I was looking for. The Flickr API is a great tool but there’s a lack of practical examples around.

    I’m now integrating this into a WordPress plugin.

    All the best

    Dave

  3. I have no expertise to help with this idea, but am very interested to hear how you get on. Especially if you build a WordPress plugin too.

  4. hi Mark,

    did you ever figure out how to show more than 50 in this great RSS feed? I’m stuck there too…

    cheers, Tom

  5. Hi Tom, I don’t think I did :-( Sadly, Flickr seems to be suffering from underinvestment in features/functionality under Yahoo ownership… shame because it is a great site in so many ways.

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