www.rutgerblom.com

These are the photos I took October 2009. Click on a photo to open it in a lightbox.

And so it was time again to change the underlying mechanism for my Photo Gallery. From now on SmugMug is delivering the slideshow here. Using SmugMug Flash Slideshow Builder it’s very easy to create beautiful embeddable slideshows. If you are on SmugMug you should give it a try.
So far I discovered SmugMug slideshows are superior to Flickr slideshows even if they require some longer loading.

FlickrRSS and Lightbox 2 are two great WordPress plugins. FlickrRSS as the name implies, fetches photos from a Flickr photostream via RSS and displays these on your blog. Lightbox is a very well known plugin that allows you to present images in a slick window.

I wanted to know how to display FlickrRSS photos in a Lightbox window. I couldn’t find very much information about this on the web, but after reading some related articles plus the Lightbox and FlickrRSS documentation I figured it out myself and it is VERY easy. Let me share it with you:

1. Log in to your WordPress blog and go to the FlickrRSS settings (Settings > flickrRSS)
2. Replace the existing HTML code in the Item HTML box with this: <a href="%image_medium%" rel="lightbox[serie]" title="%title%"><img src="%image_square%" alt="%title%" /></a>
3. Done!

Instead of linking to the photo page on Flickr (%flickr_page%) you are now linking directly to the medium sized image on Flickr (%image_medium%). This direct link is required to trigger Lightbox. The code rel="lightbox is making Lightbox open the image. The optional group name [serie] (can be called whatever you like) groups the images FlickrRSS displays and makes Lightbox 2 behave like a slideshow player.

As you see it’s very easy to make images displayed by FlickrRSS pop up in a Lightbox window when clicked on.

There is one thing you should be aware of before you configure FlickrRSS this way: You are not following Flickr’s community guidelines! The guidelines specify that if you post a Flickr photo on an external website, the photo must link back to its photo page. Please keep that in mind.