Posting wonderful Flickr photos to your blog as customized drafts.

Sharp photo by sjarvinen

Today I’ve discovered a simple, little, but extremely useful WordPress plugin that sets your incoming post from Flickr as drafts.

Nothing too complicated, it counts just ten lines of code, but if  you often use Flickr pictures in your posts, like me, you may find this plugin combined with some tricks, very powerful.

Why Flickr?

I love good photos, but I’m not a good photogrpher.
I always wanted to have great images to remark the meaning or the atmosphere of my posts, so I started to search good pictures online.

However when I found a good one it was also difficult to know if I could use it without problems due to potential licences.

Then came Flickr.

On Flickr you can search for Creative Commons licenced pictures, free to be used, even for commercial purposes!

Posting from Flickr: the good, the bad and the ugly.

• The good.
  Posting from Flickr is simple, you choose a photo and, if it’s Creative Commons licenced, you can include it, with right tags, attributes, link to the author, bells and whistles,  just by clicking on the post to blog icon. Just configure it properly and it works.
• The bad.
  Flickr is not meant to be a blogging platform, so the editor that it provide is too stripped and rigid to be really useful.
• The ugly.
  Immediately, as soon as you hit the post button, your article is published. On the fly. No way to save, review or correct what you have just written!

The solution

What if I could create a post from Flickr and then revise it in WordPress editor?

I tried a workaround to do that: I set a special user with permission to create drafts but not publish in my WordPress blog, and then set Flickr to publish using that account, so I could edit the post before publishing, but unfortunately this trick didn’t work out.

Then I found the Flickr Blog This to Draft plugin.

How I use it.

I made the dirty work just one time, when I configured my blog on Flickr, let’s see how:

<a href="{photo_url}" target="_blank">
<img class="foto" title="{photo_title} by {uploader_name}" src="{photo_src}" alt="{photo_title} by {uploader_name}" width="500" height="375" />
</a>
<p class="credits"><a href="{photo_url}" target="_blank">{photo_title}</a> by <a href="{uploader_profile}" target="_blank">{uploader_name}</a></p>
{description}


This is my standard template sent when I post pictures to my blog from Flickr. You can configure yours going on Your Account > Extending Flickr (tab) > Blogs (edit) > Layout.

You may be interested in a complete list of all the special tags in curly braces, those who are dynamically transformed in accordion to the picture posted.

As you can see, in my case, I set a default 500×375 px picture linked back to its page, with title and author cited in alt and title attribute and followed by a paragraph with the original title and the author linked accordingly.

Now each picture I post is properly inserted in a draft, consistently across all my posts and without hassles!

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