4. AHRP on Flickr

I have created a Google Gadget that one may use to display photos from Flickr.com in a slide show fashion. What started me on this gadget is my need to display photos that I and other on the Ann-Hua Rainbow Project team has taken over the years on the project's website. The problem is that there have been so many of those photos that it is difficult to put them in one by one.

Flickr is an easy to use photo-sharing web service that allows one to create an account free of charge, with a limitation of 200 photos shown on the account's Flirkr page and some amount of uploads per month. If one hits that limit, like I do, there is an option to go Pro at $24.00 per year.

What this gadget does can be seen on the side of this blog under the title AHRP on Flickr. It is a mini slide show of all photos on Flickr with the tag AHRP. One may limit the set of photos to show using a combination of a group (I created a group on Flickr called AHCS to collect all photos related to the Ann-Hua Chinese School -- Group ID: 1228870@N23 -- for example) and more tags. For example, one may specify the gadget to show only photos with students in them using tags AHRP,Student -- The gadget will then select only photos tagged with both AHRP and Student.

Now, a brief on the gadget itself: It is called flickr-show (click on the link takes one to the project page on Google Code). One may use it on Google Sites, Blogger, or any other web site that allows embedded objects and JavaScript. However, I don't know what it takes for a gadget to get on to Google's listing, so the easiest way to use flickr-show for now is to specify it by URL to the code:

http://flickr-show.googlecode.com/svn/branches/1.1/flickr-show.xml

As one can see, the version is 1.0 so there are known bugs and I am working on improvements.

On Google Sites, to add this gadget in a page, one do Insert » More gadgets ... » Add gadget by URL and then enter the URL given above. Then a configuration dialog will pop up to allow one to specify the things I have discussed above.

The rest should be easy if you know how Flickr works in terms of photo-sharing. The only thing missing from general Flickr issues is the API Key that the gadget asks. Well, that is a way for one to keep some privacy on Flickr while sharing with the world. If you don't know how to get an API key from Flickr, you may use the one I acquired for my experiments with flickr-show:

2961840042dccf8323bc6060dbd24a0b

That's all for now, until I have updates on the flickr-show project.