How to make iPhoto do Flickr

iPhoto photocastingWouldn’t it be great if iPhoto could understand Flickr? If Photocasting wasn’t something that only worked with .Mac? If you could drag high-resolution copies of your friends’ photos to your iTunes albums without having to click on the “All-Sizes” button, then “Original”, then “Download” for each and every one?

It’s possible! (Read on to find out how.)

iPhoto 6 introduced a new feature called Photocasting. Photocasts allow you to subscribe to your friends’ pictures (if they publish them via .Mac) and publish your own (if you subscribe to .Mac) Once you subscribe to a photocast in iPhoto, it shows up much the same way iTunes shares work — even better, you can copy photos from your friends freely with drag and drop.

Great, right? But no one I know uses .Mac to publish photos, and everyone uses Flickr.

Lucky for us, there’s a way to subscribe to Flickr photo streams in iPhoto, and enjoy the same drag and drop copying of full-size images. Here’s how:

Method 1: Go to the bottom of any Flickr page with an RSS feed. Copy the RSS feed link (not the Atom link), and feed it to iPhoto as a Photocast URL. iPhoto will load up 10 photos from that stream, and do so in full-res glory, so you can drag photos to any of your albums.

Method 2:Want more than 10 photos? Use Photocastr. Give it a tag and it’ll give you a feed that’s good for 100 high-res images.

Method 3:Want to subscribe to a particular photoset, and stay up to date as anything in it changes? Follow the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Posted on 3 February '06 by Amit Gupta, under Mac, Technology.

4 Comments to “How to make iPhoto do Flickr”

#1 Posted by Charlie (03.03.06 at 04:19 )

Hmm… I can’t seem to find the instructions on how to subscribe to photosets on http://phlikr.3xi.org/. Could you post a brief How-To? I’ve looking for ways to do this. Thanks!

#2 Posted by Amit Gupta (03.03.06 at 12:03 )

In iPhoto 6, go to the File menu, choose “Subscribe to Photoset”, and type in the URL of the feed of the photoset you want to subscribe to. You’re all set!

#3 Posted by Charlie (04.03.06 at 07:33 )

Yes… I get that part.. I could subscribe to tag feeds and photostreams without any problem. My question is, how do you get the feed URL of the photoset? Flickr doesn’t seem to have that functionality, and I couldn’t find any 3rd party solution, either. Thanks for the reply, BTW.

#4 Posted by Amit Gupta (04.03.06 at 15:58 )

Sorry, Charlie, I think you’re right. Flickr only provides RSS feeds for photostreams and for tags, not for sets. That means there’s no way to subscribe to sets unless someone builds something to generate an RSS feed for a set using the Flickr API








  • Subscribe


    Subscribe
    by RSS         		or Google Reader or Homepage
    del.icio.us Amit Gupta\'s Blog
    Add to My Yahoo!
    Subscribe with Bloglines

    or