Ben Michael Ward is a Web Developer in San Francisco.

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RSS Feeds of Flickr Photo-sets

By design, Flickr does not provide XML feeds of photosets. Photosets can be non-chronological, so a feed doesn’t always make sense.

That said, oftentimes a photoset is chronological and a feed would be a useful. My Abridged set works this way.

At Hack Day London I put together a little script that will convert a set into a feed, and after gigantic delay, I’ve finally documented it and put it live at Flickr.Ben-Ward.co.uk.

Fuller instructions are provided with the hack, but in short you can pass in a Flickr set ID and out will come an XML feed of the 20 most recent pictures. You can pass extra parameters in the URL to change the number of pictures and the sort order.

For example, to produce a feed of 20 items from the Abridged set: http://flickr.ben-ward.co.uk/sets/feed/72157594435188323/

You can use additional segments of the URL to alter the number of feed items and the sort order, for example:

Hopefully this will useful, perhaps especially to those using Flickr in Pipes.

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6 Responses to “RSS Feeds of Flickr Photo-sets”

  1. Comment by Matt Robin

    August 26th, 2007 at 2:57 am

    Ahhh…Flickr Feeds….(the additional segments you mention make sense and are useful to know!) Nice one Ben.

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  2. Comment by Strenioff

    August 27th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    Thaks!

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  3. Comment by Mark Ford

    August 28th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    Ben,

    I’ve just found a small issue with your feed generator (which incidentally is excellent thanks for putting it together); I had an ampersand in a couple of my photo’s titles. These where not being HTML encoded in the feed, which caused firefox and IE to choke.

    I fixed it my end by changing the titles, but it’s something you might want to look at.

    I can now try and sort out my pipe for my facebook feed. Good man!

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  4. Comment by Ben

    August 28th, 2007 at 6:58 pm

    Thanks for the bug report, Mark. I’ve updated the feed generator to encode HTML special characters. Hopefully that will resolve the problem you were having.

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  5. Comment by Noah

    September 7th, 2007 at 5:51 am

    Ben – This is excellent! I’ve been hunting for something like this. I’d like to take it a step further and have the feed import into my SlideShowPro (http://slideshowpro.net) player. When I try doing it from your script, it errors out because it requires a crossdomain.xml file on your side. Is it possible for you to provide the script to place on my server so I can avoid this issue? Is it for sale?

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  6. Comment by Jared

    October 15th, 2007 at 8:03 pm

    GREAT STUFF! I’d like to see how you got that to work.. been working on this exact thing.

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