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!