Something that JP and I just figured out at work: how to change a Flickr RSS feed so that it returns images larger than the default, using Yahoo Pipes. Here’s a feed of my photos demonstrating the functionality. Here’s the pipe in question, so that you can adapt it to your own feeds. And here’s Flickr’s documentation on its URL formats — if the 1024 pixel size is too large for you (or you want a smaller-than-normal image for some reason) consult that link and replace the “_b” in the first regex block with the appropriate underscore + letter combination (or remove it entirely for the default size of 500 pixels on the longest side).
Now that it’s got a regex module Pipes is even more powerful. It does seem at least slightly buggy, though: the regexes to strip out the width and height really should be able to be combined into a single operation (e.g. /(width|height)=['"]\d+['"]/), but that didn’t work for some reason and I had to break them out. Ah well.
The only major broken thing about Flickr’s RSS that remains is the fact that if your contacts add photos too quickly, Flickr won’t show them all to you. It’s sad but true — if your contacts post more than 20 photos in the interval between Flickr’s RSS regeneration (or your feedreader checking your contacts feed), some will simply never appear. Drag. I can think of ways to solve this, but not with Pipes, unfortunately. In fact, given that Pipes is likely to query your feed less frequently than your feedreader, this solution may suffer even more from that limitation. I haven’t tested it carefully, but suggest that you try it out side-by-side with the default Flickr feed for a while to ensure that it’s not dropping photos.
UPDATE: Looks like there’s a bug in Pipes that makes the Regex module default to operating on the “title” field when you load this pipe and edit it. Be sure to change that to point to “description” instead, otherwise the pipe won’t process the right part of the RSS and won’t alter the feed at all.
UPDATE 2: I made a modified version that lets you plug in your own contacts feed RSS URL (and delivers 500px images, not the 1024 versions). You can find it here. Just get the URL you currently use for your contacts feed out of your RSS reader (or Flickr) and paste it into the text box. Submit the form, then scroll to the bottom of the page for the link to the RSS version of the pipe’s output.
sweeeett!
You are my man. After one day searching, I found this that is nearly perfectly what I needed for my blog. :-)
Just one thing. Do you think there is a (simple, I’m poor at pipes) way to have *only* 1024px photos, stripping out smaller ones?
Anyway I’ll have you credited for the pipe on the tba new theme for my blog. :-)
Sorry Domiziano, I can’t think of a way to do that within Pipes. I mean, you could use their RPC module to make a separate script on another server check the image size and discard the image if it’s too small. But there’s no way to check it within Pipes itself, so far as I know.
Ok, thanks anyway for replying Tom. :-)
The 500 px pipe works great, but is there any way to change the size? I’ve not used pipes before, had a good look but can’t find an option to change. I could do with changing them to 800 x 480 for my digi photo frame.
thanks for any help!
aphillippe: unfortunately Pipes does not do any image resizing — Flickr makes a variety of images available via a predictable system of URLs, the Pipe is just rewriting the URL so that we point to a different one than is typically included in the RSS feed.
If you want to resize the image, it may be possible to do so with an external script that interfaces with Pipes through its web service module — but that will take some programming expertise. An easier option will be to use a too-large image from Flickr and hope that your photo frame is smart enough to resize it. See here for Flickr’s URL schemes.
thanks for the reply.
That’s exactly what I meant, probably didn’t explain it properly. I don’t want to change the size of any given image. I want to change the image that is pulled from flickr from the “m small, 240 on longest side” thumbnail to the “o original image” full image.
Obviously I need to alter the pipe slightly, but I can’t work out what to do (I said I’ve never used pipes before, this is probably really simple!).
So your pipe replaces the flickr suffix (\/\w+)_m.jpg with $1.jpg so that the rss feed pulls out a different image. Is it this that I need to change?
just to make it clear, what I’m after is an rss feed that gives me my full images (o), not smaller thumbnails (m).
Again, thanks for any help.
Yup. the $1 corresponds to the (\/\w+) part — it’s the “root” of the image, if you will. If you wanted to, get the “o original image” out, you’d want to change the “$1.jpg” to “$1_o.jpg”.
Good luck!
thanks.
I managed to work it out, but hit another wall. To get the original size, there is a further layer of security, the secret key. This needs to be put into the url of the image within the rss feed. I assume this would be done in a similar way to the above, but I can’t figure it out. My pictures are too small to have a “b” 1024 thumbnail, so I’m stuck at 500, still too small for my photo frame. Grrr.
Thanks for all the help anyway, though.
Yeah, not much I can do there, I’m afraid. It would be possible to create such an application using the Flickr API, but that will require a bit more hands-on programming than Pipes does.
thanks.:)
i was looking for this solution for quite a while
Thanks for this article, I hadn’t seen it was so simple to get the thumbnail size you want…
I’ve just setup http://www.bigflickrfeed.com
All you have to do is paste in your photostream url and it will give you a feed with the large size images.
Brilliant stuff! Thanks!
Amazingly useful – thanks so much for doing this.
I want your babies!