Allowing people to download a subset of images on Flickr

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 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 Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My photostream on Flickr is reasonably well locked down.  I try to strike a balance between sharing and protecting my intellectual property (not that I use it to generate an income…).  Basically, I don’t add watermarks but everything is All Rights Reserved © (although they could be licensed, if they were good enough); only I can access my original image files; only I can print my images; and only I can download images.

RNLI Little Haven 7A few weeks ago though, I was enjoying a family holiday in Wales and I saw the local RNLI lifeboat crew returning from an exercise. I picked up my camera and grabbed some snapshots (and that’s all they were – there was no planning; I was shooting straight into the sun, etc.) but the Helmsman asked if I could send the images to him. Email’s not great for shipping around 12 megapixel images, so I thought I’d share them via Flickr. Unfortunately it seemed that I couldn’t let him download the images… not unless I dropped the security on the whole photostream.

Then I found a workaround.  Even though the default license I selected is All Rights Reserved ©, I can change the license on selected images. Granting a Creative Commons (i.e. Some Rights Reserved) license to the Little Haven lifeboat images gave others the option to download them. Result.

I’m sure this information is buried somewhere in the Flickr website but it didn’t come easily to me, so I’m sharing it here – hopefully it’s useful to someone else!

Displaying more than 20 items in my Flickr feed

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 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 Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.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.