Flickr Feeds for Second Life

Hamlet has an article about finding the best of Second Life™ on social media. See: What Are Your Favorite Second Life-Themed Flickr Feeds? Hamlet is ‘besotted’ by the images of Lemon Panda of Second Life home interiors. Add your favorite feed to the comments in the first link.

Simple Elegance Office/Show Studio

Simple Elegance Office/Show Studio by Lemon Panda, on Flickr

Hamlet is interested in feeds people like. He asks for widgets that people use to show off various Flickr  feeds. Feeds… hmmmm. I have various sites feeding into my Feedly reader. But, what feeds can one take directly from Flickr? About a zillion… and that is just those related to Second Life. but Flickr feeds are not intuitive and I don’t see a feed button.

Flickr HELP is out of date, referring to a button at the bottom right of the page. No… I don’t see a RSS or Subscribe button. Some of the pages I would want to subscribe to have no bottom…  

For the geeky there is documentation on Flickr Feeds here. This is for those that intend to build a plug-in or code an image display into a web page. Way tech… way more than I wanted to know or had time to absorb. Keith Muth wrote an article that is more what I was looking for: Pulling Your Flickr Feed with jQuery. But, it too is for those building widgets for Flickr. I show it because it was written in 2008 and his widget is now broken. Flickr changes. So, expect your widgets to break from time to time and have to be re-written or updated.

What I would like is a way to add great images to my Feedly. Of course I just want the images I like… but, that is asking too much. However, I can add the groups and people I like. That narrows it some. By adding groups I can discover new artists/photographers and then follow them. But, how to add them to Feedly?

There is a share icon, arrow looking thingy, in the upper right. If you copy that URL for sharing and paste it into Feedly’s search, you will get 3 identical looking choices in a drop down. Usually the 3rd, last choice is the one you want. I found it easier to copy the URL from the browser’s address/search field and use that in Feedly’s search. It seems you need a URL that ends in POOL, i.e., https://www.flickr.com/groups/sl_400/pool

But, not all of those work… I don’t know why. Nor do all the group pool feeds work well. The group URL’s keep shorting to: https://www.flickr.com/photos/  when what I wanted is: https://www.flickr.com/groups/xploringsecondlife/pool/. While the feed heading link fails the group entry seems to work.

Get Your Ducks in a Row

Get Your Ducks in a Row by Cash Meili, on Flickr

I also found that some people are using Yahoo Pipes and pouring that into Feedly. Again, it gets pretty geeky. The idea in Pipes is to take a number of RSS feeds and combine them into a single feed. Of course you can run just one RSS feed through the pipe to get a useable feed. This is a tool for working with feeds, so apparently one has some control over the output format and input parsing.

So, it is possible but a bit awkward to add Flickr feeds to Feedly. I find it is easiest to join the groups.

Jump over to New World Notes and post your favorite Flickr feeds in comments.

If you wonder how Flickr makes money, see: Yahoo Is Selling Flickr Photos (12/2014).

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