iPhoto 6 and flickr
I was hoping it would be true, and today I got to verify it: You can subscribe to a flickr RSS feed in iPhoto 6 and it will appear as a Photocast (large screenshot) just like any other Photocast. Unfortunately it’s only the small images you normally get with flickr feeds, but fortunately there are clickable URLs to the flickr pages for every one of those photos. Cool stuff!
Update: For the curious I have set up a Photocast of my own.
Update 2: Interesting. If you want to view my Photocast in an RSS reader that’s not iPhoto 6, they want you to use a different URL.
Question : how did you get iPhoto 6 so fast ? It’s only possible to get it next week from the Apple Store website. Looks good though (they upgraded the interface to the iTunes/Mail unified grey…)
[…] And now, I see in this screenshot that iPhoto 6 sports the new “Metal Unified” interface introduced in iTunes 6 (and more-or-less in Mail), and that you now can subscribe to Flickr RSS feeds directly from within iPhoto ! How cool is that ? Very cool. […]
Yeah, I suspect the Metal Unified look in iTunes 6 was merely a precursor to having that interface used in all of iLife. So the Metal Unified look is now the iLife ‘06 look.
Check this out: if you spoof your User-Agent string, you can get a hold of the actual HTML. It’s basically just some Javascript that checks to see if you’re using a recent version of Safari: if you are, you get redirected to “photo://photocast.mac.com/…”; if not, you get sent to “feed://web.mac.com/…”.
So, what’s the “photo:” protocol, and how do we reverse-engineer it? ;)
Hm. You know, I tried to view it on FireFox in Mac OS X, but it wants to download the RSS file instead of use FireFox to display it, yet it works fine in Safari.
That can’t be good.
Justin Voss: photo:// is just a url handler that’s registered with Safari, the same way that MarsEdit registers marsedit:// so you can send pages to ME via a bookmarklet. photo:// tells Safari (and any other internet browsing app on OS X) that that URL needs to be routed to iPhoto, whereas feed:// URLs get sent to your default RSS reader. So the URL starting with web.mac.com is for general use by all RSS readers, and the photocast.mac.com one is for use specifically with iPhoto.
I’ve set a subscribed to a couple of Flickr Rss Streams in iPhoto, and yes it does work. An it does download the full high res version (the heighest that was uploaded). It seems to download a thumbnail first, but if you watch a photo for a while, it will be downloading the full one in the background! then displays it when its got it. It takes a while downloading big pictures (obviously).
If anyone is interested I threw this together today. http://phlikr.3xi.org/
It will take a feed from flickr and rework it a little so that it uses the large images and contains the comment of the photo as well. It is an Atom 1.0 feed that seems to validate on the feeds I have tested, it also includes most of the extra apple stuff debated here. If I can work out the date format I will add that too, and myabe the tags can be retrived and added so they appear as keywords.
To use just paste any feed from flickr into the box and hit the button, the feed should just open up in iPhoto, if not it will just be a regular atom feed with all the relevent enclosures so it will work in NetNewsWire or whatever your reader is.
If its useful let me know.
Actually, I found that the Atom feed from flickr only sends the thumbnails. But the RSS2.0 feed sends the largest uploaded image to iPhoto. Excellent!
Just use the RSS feed that has ‘format=rss_200′ in the URL instead of the atom version.
Nick T, thanks for the tip, that explains the conflicting accounts!
This is pretty cool. Although I’m only able to see the last 10 photos from a flickr feed. Anyone know how to overcome the 10 photo limit?
Lumineux, just to let you know, I updated http://phlikr.3xi.org and it has some beta functionality to overcome to 10 item limit. Read down the page for instructions, and give me some feedback if what you want isnt currently there.
John, thanks for adding the new functionality, but iPhoto is timing out on me so I can’t try it out. “Request to phlikr.3xi.org failed after trying for 30 seconds.”
My guess is that your site is becoming really popular, and there’s a heavy load on it. :-(
I have also put up a flickr->photocast converter (photocastr.com)
I allow you to authenticate my app so you can access your private photos.
I include the tags (not the raw ones, as currently flickr is too slow for that, so if you use tags like “My Tag”, it will
come through with the keyword mytag). That means you’ll have to change your iPhoto keywords to see them
match up. iPhoto just drops keywords in the feed that it doesn’t already know about.
This is still alpha, so they are more features to come. But it works pretty well for me.
If you add the keyword “Photocast” in iPhoto, you can make smart albums that include photos
in your photocastr feeds. This lets you sync to your ipod.
(Thanks to John Evans for that hack!)
while I don’t see any photos in the stream and rss with phlickr it works fine with photocast.com
Hm. You know, I tried to view it on FireFox in Mac OS X, but it wants to download the RSS file instead of use FireFox to display it, yet it works fine in Safari.
That can’t be good.