Larger Images in Flickr Feeds
So enough of the serious talk, let's get back to the geeky stuff.
I'm a Flickr fan. I love it, use it and abuse it. One little niggle that's always perplexed me however is Flickr's use of the "thumbnail" size instead of the "medium" size in their RSS feeds. If you'd like mostly to look at photos in your RSS reader and not have to click on every single one to see them, viewing the thumbnail gets a little frustrating. So I set out to change this. Here's a quick 5 step process to get you larger images in Flickr RSS feeds.
I hired Yahoo! Pipes to do the job ... it seemed like a perfect fit. And it was!
Step 1
First you'll need to login to Yahoo! Pipes. And for that you'll need a Yahoo! account. Lucky for you that if you're trying this tutorial for a Flickr feed you'll already have a Yahoo! account. Once logged in, select "create new pipe."
Step 2
Grab the feed you'd like to modify. In my case I grabbed Flickr's feed for "All Your Contact's Photos." Use the "Fetch Feed" item under the "Sources" list first and enter the feed's address there:
Step 3
This is where we'll do the quick find and replace to get the image size we want. First add the "Loop" item under the "Operators" list. Then drag the "String Regex" item from the "Strings" list and drop it into the "Loop" item. After its in there, make sure both "For each" and "assign results to" are set to "item.description".
The first thing we're gonna do is tell it to look for any reference to "_m.jpg" and replace it with just simply ".jpg".
Now you'd think this is all it would take ... but you'd be wrong. The problem is that Flickr sends the image size in the html img tag, it doesn't rely on the size of the photo alone. So even though this will get you the correct image, it'll still display small.
Step 4
So in this step we're gonna do a couple more find&replace's and get rid of those silly dimension html elements. We'll just replace them with something silly for now so that they won't be parsed correctly.
Step 5
Now we just save our pipe & run it. After you do, Yahoo! will have an RSS link for you. Grab that and place it into your RSS reader and Voila!