Flickr Relents - The Direct Link Returns

I was going to publish a post on my travel blog last night before I went to bed.  Unfortunately, when I tried to include the first photograph, Flickr would not let me link to my photo.  There was no link code displayed at all when I clicked on their "Share" icon.  I played with it for a while, then gave up and decided to come back to it today.

This morning, I tried the exact same thing, and, like magic, not only did the "Share" icon display my size options and link code but the old "direct sharing" html link was back!  There are now two "radio buttons" options available where there were none for the past couple of months.

Good grief - the Internet is the wild wild west of the computer frontier.

Here is the the way Flickr now lets you share a picture on your blog.  I will display it two ways.  First, using the iframe embed code that has been the only option for the past two months.


And now I'll use the new html link code that had been "disappeared" for those same two months.


No difference to the viewer, right?  Except that if you "mouse over" the first image, you can run through the whole set while "mouse over" on the second produces the information that I have not not titled the image and it gives you a link to the single image in the set.  By the way, if you click the right arrow to run through that set, you will be able to see the two "radio buttons" that I am talking about.

This will no doubt produce a lot of happy faces for bloggers that use WordPress since that service doesn't support iframes at all.  There has been considerable gnashing of teeth by these folks since the previous Flickr change.

Flickr had justified the dropping of the direct link with a hard-to-find message in one of their FAQs:

The direct link to a photo file is no longer shown on the page. Per the Flickr Community Guidelines "pages on other websites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr." Linking directly to the photo file doesn't do this.

I am anxious to see if they now "disappear" that FAQ!

Flickr and Blogger Can Drive You Nuts

When Flickr decided to go with Iframe to for the sharing code used to embed their photos (see the post immediately below), I didn't like some of the side effects.  But it was actually a better methodology, and by using Flickr Sets, which I always do, the whole photostream wasn't exposed in every embed.

One other side effect that I had experienced was that when I embedded into a blogger post, I had no photo show up in my "Compose" view of the post.  There was just white space, indistinguishable from the background.  This was pretty poor from a composition standpoint, but I just wrote it off to the war between parents Google and Yahoo not wanting to place nice together.  The same thing shows up in Blogger's Preview.

Today, I added a couple of pictures to an old post on my travel blog - and what's this? The new pictures showed up in Compose, but not the old ones!

More wasted time playing with code to find out WTF!

Here is what happens when I used the link code for a photo two days ago and what happens when I linked to the same picture today:



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Now I know that the above two images look identical to you once they are published.  So here is what they look like to me while in Compose mode or on Preview.  (I screen-captured it for you and will publish it as a localy sourced Blogger image.)

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That;s right - no image on the two day old stuff, nice image today.  Did Flickr fix a bug?  What' changed, by the way?

Well, here is the old link code generated by Flickr and the new.

 <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="272" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjsawyer/13060029443/in/set-72157642150476853/player/" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe>

And, here is the new:

<iframe src="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tjsawyer/13060029443/in/set-72157642150476853/player/" width="500" height="272" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>

A little changing of the order of things but the real change is from "http" to "https"

Why?  Well, Flickr fessed up to changing some SSL things here.

Sometime in the last few months, we went and updated our API SSL endpoints. Shame on us for not making a bigger deal about it!

But without much explanation.  And why does Blogger show one of the images in Compose and Preview but not the other while showing both when Published?  Beats me.  But I'll accept the improvement in functionality without argument.  But it would be nice if these behemoths software concerns just shared with us poor customers what they are doing once in a while.  I know that not all of their customers are nerds like I am - but a lot of normal folks ask us what's going on from time to time.