I am looking at moving all of the photos on an existing site over to Flickr. The plan is to convert the site over to WordPress and use the images from Flickr so I wanted an easy way to insert photos. I was looking for something that would be as simple to use as ImageManager or WordPress’s existing interface. So I went over to WordPress.org/extend/plugins to see what everyone was using.
The most popular Flickr plugin was PhotoXhibit by Benjamin Sterling. It has a lot of appealing qualities. You could bring photos from Picasa, Flickr, and Smugmug. It has a lot of sophistication and it used jQuery for the heavy lifting. I just could not get it to work right. It was unbearably slow showing the pictures.
Then I tried Flickr Manager. This plugin worked despite the fact the ReadMe file says it needs PHP version 5 and my PHP version says it is 4.4.7. It looked really good. It used a very straightforward and intuitive way to insert photos. My only complaint was that it had this Lightbox thing going on. That meant that my web page was going to load the prototype JavaScript library and its friends(~100K). Recently I found a jQuery version of Lightbox that is a much lighter load so I really did not want to go back to loading prototype and his friends.
The next plugin I tried was WP-Flickr. This plugin worked but had less features than Flickr Manager. I thought about hacking this plugin to add support for jQuery Lightbox to show the larger picture when you clicked on it. Before I had gotten too far in my thinking I was struck with the thought that Flickr Manager has more desirable features. Maybe I should look at changing Flickr Manager to work without the prototype library. It was an easy change. All I had to do was comment out one line. I even found the lines to change to get the Lightbox feature to work with the jQuery version of Lightbox. Well it kind of works. I did not get it to work properly with single photos. It never finishes loading the larger photo from Flickr. The demo at Trent’s site shows the Lightbox feature working with photo sets. Lightbox is a “would be nice” feature for me. The way it works now is to take you to the Flickr page of the larger photo. That’s not that bad so I decided to stick with the slightly hacked version of Flickr Manager. Now I can start uploading pictures to Flickr.