Flickr is a kick ass photo sharing site, absolutely the best. And, WordPress plugin makers know it and take full advantage – there are dozens of Flickr plugins for WordPress. That means it is very easy and powerful to share photos using Flickr and easily make them part of WordPress sites such as the Toronto Shooters Club. Our website also uses BuddyPress: possibly the single most comprehensive plugin for WordPress, BuddyPress adds all of the social networking features to the website such as member profiles, activity feed, the ability to privately and publicly message other members, and communicate in forums.

I’ve set up the site with two main Flickr plugins, Slickr-Flickr and oEmbed for BuddyPress. Let’s deal with oEmbed first. WordPress natively incorporates a very cool and powerful URL embedding feature. Simply by adding an URL to a resource on a qualified website, a blogger using WordPress can embed content into their blog posts with no further effort required. Many sites are supported, including:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• DailyMotion
• blip.tv
• Flickr (both videos and images)
• Viddler
• Hulu
• Qik
• Revision3
• Scribd
• Photobucket
• PollDaddy
• Google Video
• WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)

So, yeah, but you’re probably thinking that you’re not a blogger, at least on this site, so how does that help? Well, thanks to oEmbed for BuddyPress, the URL embedding feature is extended to the forums functionality provided by BuddyPress. That means that you can write up a forum post and, simply by including the URL to an image you’ve posted in Flickr, it will appear inline in your forum post! Neat, eh? You can also post a link to your Flickr photo set within your forum post. So, for example, you can upload your sets from photo walks, then pick your favourite one, write a forum post here on Toronto Shooters Club and include that favourite photo and link to the whole set so we can all go see your great photos!

One very important thing – Flickr shows the URL for photos at the bottom of photo pages in two ways; first, as HTML code to put into a web page; like this:

However, neither of those work for oEmbed. Instead, cut and paste the URL from the address bar of your browser when you are on the page where your photo is displayed by itself – Flickr calls this the “Flickr Photo Download” page (here is an example) in the page title that appears at the top of your browser window or in your browser tabs. You will see this page and be able to pick different sizes of your image after clicking on the All Sizes button above your photo when browsing through your sets. The link will have your Flickr username in it and it will look something like this:

I know, all that sounds complicated, but in practice it’s really easy. Just do these steps:

1. Upload your photos to Flickr
2. Organize them into a set
3. Pick the one you want to show in your forum post
4. Make sure you are on the “Flickr Photo Download” page showing a particular size of your photo
5. Copy the URL from your browser’s address bar
6. Come back to the Toronto Shooters Club site where you are posting a message in a forum
7. Paste the URL from step 5 into your post on a line by itself

Not that bad, right? Roman started a forum topic called “Linking TSC Flickr Pool pics to TSC site” in the General Club Group and asked about this. I wrote a reply and included an embedded Flickr photo of some green spring plants. You can see the forum post in the General Club Group.

Meanwhile, there is also Slickr Flickr. This one is almost all automatic, there is very little for you to do. Slickr Flickr is behind the slideshow of recent Club photos in the Club Flickr photo pool that appears in the blog post at the very top of the Home page for the website and behind the gallery of 10 thumbnails that appears in the righthand sidebar on the site. Club photos automatically appear in the slideshow and gallery as long as you do three things:

1. Join the Toronto Shooters Club group on Flickr – I’ve set that up so that I have to authorize you, it’s not instantaneous
2. Once I’ve authorized you in the group and you upload your photos into your own Flickr sets, you just tag your photos with the tag: torontoshootersclub <- all one lower case word - and then
3. Add them to the Toronto Shooters Club group

Now, that’s much easier, right?

If you’ve realized that I haven’t thoroughly explained how to arrange everything at Flickr, that’s because Flickr has tons of awesome help resources, far better than anything I could come up with. Just visit Flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/help/ to find out whatever you need to know. Or, you can always ask me in person to give you a hand.

Let me know if you have any more questions!!