The Best Hacks on Flickr

One of the nice things about Flickr is that because of their open API a whole host of developers have built more and more interesting things to do with the site. It's interesting to me today that so many of the ways that I use Flickr are not even through the site as designed by Yahoo, but instead through the work of outside developers who are constantly creating new and interesting ways to experience the site. Today I thought I'd share what I think are the top 10 Hacks on Flickr. This list is by no way exhaustive or complete, but as somewhat of a power user who uses the site every day I thought I'd offer some tools that you might want to try out. One note is that many of the best hacks on Flickr today are being done through Greasemonkey scripts. These will not work with Internet Explorer but will work with Firefox or Flock. So on with the list.

1. The number one hack for Flickr would have to be Andrew Houser (who is also a kick ass photographer), or simply Houser as he is often called, with the tagline, "because paging sucks." When Houser released Flickrleech originally it would allow you to pull up any Flickr user's photos as a full page of thumbnails with no pagination. Although very cool, loading up 7,000 thumbnails wasn't exactly the nicest things to do to Flickr's servers and Houser actually changed his site to load 500 thumbnails at a time and today it sits at 200 thumbnails at a time. Still, having the ability to browse a flickr user's photos at 200 thumbnails at a time is remarkable and allows you more photos on a single page than anything Flickr offers up themselves. I'm constantly using Flickrleech to check out a new photographer's photos or to rapid fire go through someone's stream. 2. The number two hack for Flickr is a newer one and was released earlier this month by Intel's SmartSetr. One of the annoying things about Flickr is that when you want to create a set you must do it manually. Even with batch tools this gets tedious and having to add every new photo to a set every single time sucks. So Eric developed SmartSetr. SmartSetr allows you the ability to build sets that are organized around the concepts of tags, dates, and other metadata associated with a photo. If, for instance, you want to build a set called More from Eric directly. Flickr Multi Group Sender. It was developed by Flickr rich edit and it was written by 5. Tabblo. This is kind of an unusual one. Maybe not so much of a hack, but it sure feels like one. Tabblo is a photosharing site that allows you the ability to customize the feel, layout, tone and design of your photo page. The yin and the yang of Flickr is that everyone's pages look the same. On the one hand this gives Flickr a very elegant, almost like a virtual art gallery or museum feel. On the other hand sometimes people want more customization over how their photos are presented. Some companies like SmugMug make this customization part of how they diferentiate from Flickr. Flickr is torn because while you might like to give users more control over the design of the photos, if you're not careful, the next thing you know the place ends up looking like MySpace. Enter Tabblo. Tabblo uses the Flickr API to import your photos into their site and then allows you the ability to design a page however you like. The nice thing about Tabblo is that unlike SmugMug the site is free and with a direct Flickr import function makes it super easy to design special custom pages using your Flickr photos. 6. Flickrmud. One of the problems for some Flickr users is that because the site is popular ofentimes it gets blocked. A while back Flickr was being blocked in the entire UAE. There have been reports of libraries blocking Flickr and certainly businesses blocking Flickr who don't want their employees wasting away valuable company time on social networking or seeing the occasional porn shot that creates company liability. While one answer is to simply buy your own laptop with EVDO and bring it to work, this isn't always the most economical approach. But if you are experiencing Flickr blockage somewhere check out FlickrMud. How Flickr mud works is that you simply change the url to access Flickr. Instead of accessing thomashawk's flickrstream like this: http://www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com/photos/thomashawk. By adding the .mud.yahoo before the .com oftentimes you can access the site because this way of accessing Flickr is much less known and less likely to be blocked. Mum's the word on this one of course ;) Gabriel Hanford. Once on your hard drive you can better make use of these images for your screen saver or for your desktop backgrounds and all that. One of my favorite things to do is to sit back and watch my Media Center PC rotate through my favorites from Flickr on beautiful full high res clarity. One note with this. You might want to check out the photo license of the photos that you choose to download with Slickr. Although Slickr works with all licenses, technically you'd be breaking the rules by downloading an all rights reserved licensed photo. Creative Commons licensed photos of course (like mine) are free to use for non commercial (in my case) use and if you want to download all of my images for your screen saver, desktop, etc., or even just one of my sets like ...of course it's up to you whether or not you think it's a good idea or right to use your friend's email addresses this way. Steve Cohen and offers a better, faster, way to upload. You can enter in default tags, descriptions, etc. for all of your photos or you can easily select photos to bulk tag/descript before uploading to Flickr. jUploader is also our official uploader for Zooomr as well and if you want to upload your shots to Flickr and Zooomr, once you are done with one you can simply click on the other to send your photos there as well. jUploadr runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. Related posts: Top 10 Tips for Getting Attention on Flickr If you like these Flickr hacks Comments Add to Del.icio.us | Reddit | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco based photographer and technology writer. He publishes the web site Zooomr.