Bringing in FlickR Photos - Robert Thivierge

Today, I imported the bulk of my images from my FlickR page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/thivierr/) to here on this WordPress website (https://www.robertthivierge.com), which meant importing over 2,500 images with their descriptions. For the longest time, I uploaded my photography primarily to FlickR. Sadly, FlickR has declined over the years. There’s been a loss of interest/use by the public, limited improvements by the site itself, and an increase in the cost of usage. I may eventually drop FlickR entirely. I also wanted the pictures, on my own website, that I have full control over.

There are some import utilities around, but I decided to write my own custom WordPress plug-in, Rob’s FlickR Importer, to do the importation of the files. FlickR lets me download all of my data, and my plug-in processes them. I might eventually release a freely licensed version of the plug-in, when I make it more re-usable than it is now. For now, it’s pretty customized to my purposes.

I completed the first major task, which is bringing in all the images, and creating a post for each, all in current WordPress format (using Gutenberg blocks). Now, that I have 2,500+ images, I will need to have a much better way for people to peruse them.

I used WordPress’s custom taxonomy feature, which lets me do a custom system of organization (going beyond the built-in category and tags). The FlickR albums appear to the user like categories, and the FlickR tags appear like WordPress tags. Except, each has only FlickR images in it. A fresh interface is going to be needed to let all the images be easily accessible. I don’t think anybody wants to page through 2,500 images 15-at-a-time, like they do with regular WordPress posts. I’m thinking of having a parallel text-oriented approach (like what’s here now) and a visually-oriented approach. I want something that feels fluid, and works with touch screens. Maybe an infinite scroll. That will take some time to implement.

Feel free to share any feedback after you take a look.

Below is a “tag cloud” you can use to jump to related images, based on FlickR tags. The numbers of images in each tag is brackets.

The following tag cloud is created from albums in FlickR: