Fetchr4SSP(TM) is a Fetchr(TM)-based PHP script that will fetch photos from Flickr to display as albums inside the awesome gallery software SlideShowPro!
- Allows you to fetch all of your Flickr photosets as albums inside your gallery
- Allows you to fetch any Flickr user’s public photosets, recent photos, “favorites”, and/or “most interesting” photos (according to Flickr) and load them as albums inside your gallery
- Allows you to fetch an album of photos from a Flickr group
- Allows you to fetch an album of photos filtered by specific tags
- Allows you to fetch photos at any resolution that Flickr supports
- Allows you to fetch both public AND private Flickr photos that you have READ access
- Allows you to fetch photo descriptions from Flickr to use as photo captions inside your gallery
- Allows manual and programmatic refreshing of your XML images file, or your entire cache of Flickr API calls
The final result is a Flickr photo gallery wrapped in a premiere Flash-based slideshow interface that is delightful to your web visitors.
Visit the official Fetchr4SSP homepage!
Background
This project started for me just trying to finagle my own way of getting all my Flickr photos organized into album photosets and all available in an easy-to-use interface on one of my WordPress-driven websites. A tall order… but I knew it was doable. After fumbling with some WordPress plugins and such, nothing really worked smoothly enough. A Flash solution was needed, so purchased a license for SlideShowPro (SSP) and I couldn’t be happier! 
The next task was putting together a PHP script that would build the complex XML needed to properly load all my Flickr photos organized into photosets into SSP. I tried an existing one with some success, but it lacked a few vital functions I needed… and it wouldn’t handle certain SSP abilities. Soooo, I coded my own. And after some polishing decided to put together a sharp website to peddle my fine creation to the masses.
I'm a Christ-follower, compelled by my faith toward reason, which points directly toward conservatism. This world's daily onslaught of lunacy offends my intellect and senses, so this is my venue to blow off steam.
Is this script able to pull in private flickr photos?
@Tim
Not yet, but it could. You’d only be able to display your own private photos (obviously) because I’d need you to enter your Yahoo password into the config file (it’s not currently required).
Do you think there is a desire for that?
I would love to be able to display my own private photos. If you don’t want to add it officially could you help me to add the login info to the config file?
@Tim
It won’t be that easy it turns out. You made me curious so I dug around in the Flickr API.
A couple things are annoying… the authentication is tricky, but apparently doable. But the way photos are retrieved from Flickr you cannot simply say “give me all photos from privacy level 1 (public) to 4 (friends & family)”. Although you only want private (level 5) I would gues most people would want to be able to show ALL photos (levels 1 thru 5)… or perhaps just levels 2 and 3, etc. What I’d have to do is stack the photos toegethr after getting all the different levels people wanted… but then the photos are out of order.
It gets messy. Perhaps if you explain what your intended use or target audience is… or any additional details… it can help me to determine what use cases I’d be dealing with.
I would like to display all my photos that are either public, family, or friends in the slideshow. I have almost all of my photos on flickr as family and friends and I use a separate private website to display those photos. I would love to use ssp to display those photos.
It would be nice for others to have the option to select which types of photos to display (public, private, family, friends).
The ability to show private photos is coming soon. So is showing “favorites”.
@Tim
I have added the ability to show non-public photos.
I love this software. Talk about a life saver. I have a problem though. My software will not refresh. I probably have too many pictures. After awhile will it get too big? Or does it simply pick up where it left off when building the xml file? After 30 seconds it times out. It stops and it hasn’t refreshed it yet up to where the current photosets are. Also is there a way I can utilize collections too? Thanks for your help.
Best regards,
Matt
OK, I have a support ticket into my website host. I have another question. Is there a way for me to pull in pictures from a group on Flickr? The reason I’m asking is because, I took a trip to China with a group of about 38 individuals and we all took pictures. This would be a great way to collectively pool all of our photos and soon Video (when you get that working and Flickr does something with video):o)
Another idea for running the XML builder for many photos on Flickr would be to have a program that could run the script on your computer rather than on the actual website. Then all you would have to do is simply copy over the images.xml file with a new one built on your computer. It is more convenient to have it built on the website, but if it’s too big it makes sense. What’s your thoughts on this?
@Matt
Hey, lots of good ideas. I’ve been toying with the idea of “collections” and “groups”, too.
Regarding the huge process of file updating, I address that in the FAQ on the website… check it out. My personal gallery takes around 5-10 minutes to refresh. The answer is a CRON job.
Also, even if you wanted to build the XML file locally, you’d still have to update the website manually. You could produce the same result by instead setting the cache timeout to something very large (i.e. infinite timeout) and then simply hitting the URL directly with a cache_refresh trigger… your visitors wouldn’t notice that a new XML file was being created in the background because the old one is still valid (hadn’t timed out) and doesn’t get overwritten until the new one is finished.
Thanks for responding to my questions.
As far as implementation of collections and groups, I would pay for that right now. It would certainly help me out a lot. I’m sure people would love that too.
I’m having trouble because when I refresh the CACHE with photolord.com/fetchr4ssp.php?cache_refresh
or XML with photolord.com/fetchr4ssp.php?xml_refresh it timeouts at around 50 seconds. They said they increased the php limit, but it keeps timing out.
Now I don’t claim to be a website guru, but it seems to me this is a php timeout problem. What do you think. You would know. Also, you mentioned something about setting the cache timeout to something very large (i.e. infinite timeout). How do I do that? Maybe that would solve my problem. I was looking in the file for something with the cache timeout and I can’t find that. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Matt
$fetchr_settings['cache_expire'] = 31557600;
That will make the cache last a YEAR!
When you do “photolord.com/fetchr4ssp.php?xml_refresh” manually it probably will, indeed, timeout on your browser if you’ve got a lot of photos. But that doesn’t mean it “failed”. The code is still working behind the scenes to refresh the cache and rebuild the XML file… it just didn’t respond fast enough to satisfy the web server’s timeout… but it’s still working. After five to ten minutes or so your XML file will be a new one… and in the meantime people hitting the gallery will still see the soon-to-be-old XML file without delay.
I setup a CRON job – a periodic job on my host that will refresh my cache, using “cache_refresh”, daily. I set my timeout to be 90000 (25 hours), so that nobody sees any delay on my gallery.
Just to point out to you… Using “xml_refresh” will rebuild the XML file from EXISTING CACHE using whatever tweaks you’ve made to the fetchr4ssp.php configuration settings. This should be fairly fast (10 seconds at most). Once you run “cache_refresh”, however, you will have just wiped and started rebuilding your entire stored cache… so for about 5 to 10 minutes after that using “xml_refresh” won’t be fast at all… because there’s no existing cache to use to “instantly” rebuild the XML file.
Get it?
I can certainly “rush” groups and collections along… some PayPal love would be appreciated
and you’ll be the first to get it as soon as it’s working, before I’ve commented it, packaged it, updated the docs, updated Payloadz.com… and FINALLY sent it to everyone (usually a week delay). I’ll even put your entire amount of PayPal love toward the little girl we sponsor in Bolivia through Compassion International!!!
I just checked the Flickr API and they don’t support fetching photos/photosets from a collection. That’s crazy!? I joined their API discussion group and apparently they’ve been talking about providing this for a WHILE, but they haven’t yet.
I’m starting to understand it a little better now. My php are timing out after 50 seconds, but I can simply refresh the XML about 4 or 5 times and it builds my images.xml file that way.
As far as collections go for Flickr hopefully there will be an implementation soon for API. I would pay for the ability of group api. I could start a group and it would certainly help out a good deal. Let me know if you are able to get group API working for Flickr and I will pay for that. Thanks for your help.
I have completed the ability to display a group’s photo pool. (and a few other goodies)
Awesome! How do I get it?
Email me.
Ok great, I emailed you. Can’t wait to try out groups with Fetchr4SSP.
Version 1.3 is out!
* Added option for an album of Flickr group photos
* Added option for an album of photos filtered by specific tags
* Added option for an album of a user’s “most interesting” photos (according to Flickr)
* Switched method of specifying a Flickr user from their Flickr username to the Flickr user ID
Hi Steve,
I’ve been messing around with Slideshow pro to stream flickr photosets to a nice gallery interface, came up against the 20 image limitation of the flickr feeds & then found your script, hurray!
Can you tell me if it’s possible to specify the size of the image to load from flickr? i.e. the 500px wide ‘medium’ version would be appropriate. I’ve found SSP grabs the originals by default which can be very large and therefore take a long time to load.
Many thanks, A.
Twenty pics is lame!
Fetchr can fetch you 500 per album!
Yes, Fetchr4SSP lets you choose which Flickr size image to fetch for both your thumbnails and your full-size pics. I have mine set to “Medium” for thumbnails and “Original” for full-size… but you’re right, the originals can take a while to load, and usually Medium is fine.
I also have a size option in Fetchr called “Biggest” that will fetch the biggest Flickr photosize available (Original if available, otherwise Large if available, otherwise Medium). I also have a similar size option called “Bigger” that will fetch Large if available, otherwise Original if available, otherwise Medium.
Hi Steve,
I’m trying to get Fetchr to work for me but I’ve hit a bit of a wall. I have SSP working just fine but the test page I have using Fetchr doesn’t show any pictures (http://www.dw2.net/flickr/dw2flickrssp.html). When I navigate directly to the fetchr4ssp.php file I get this error:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_CLASS in /home/virtual/site152/fst/var/www/html/flickr/fetchr4ssp/includes/fetchr.class.php on line 10
Any idea what I’ve done wrong or what’s going on? I did check with my hosting company and found out that my site is currently running PHP in something called ’safe mode’. I’m not sure if that would make a difference.
Any help would be appreciated.
cheers,
Dan
Dan,
Sounds like you’re trying out the trial version (that’s cool, obviously) and that your host has not upgraded to PHP5 (which is crazy because PHP4 isn’t even supported anymore). That error is exclusive to PHP4 users.
I did make a custom Fetchr version for PHP4 folks, but I don’t keep a “crippled” version for trial use.
I’d recommend bugging your host about PHP5.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CLASS in /home/rfmaf0/public_html/fetchr4ssp/includes/fetchr.class.php on line 10
i get this at this url
http://rfmafrica.com/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php
this is the test one i have put up
http://www.rfmafrica.com/main-slideshow/fetchr.html
with this in the place of where the .xml should go
http://rfmafrica.com/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php
is this correct or is it meant to go to and actual .xm with the link in the .xml??
an i am on lunarpages and i am sure that they have php5 how would i know??
PHP version 4.4.7 sorry just checked how do they upgrade?? can i ask them too..
aha i have just enabled it.. and i have got it running locally but it doesnt work when i upload to the server…?? here are the two test urls i have been using?
main-slideshow/fetchr.html
sorry it seems that i have it all working now and its great my cache was still an issue?? lol
thanks for your help now time to buy it so that i can do all of this
Hello I have the same issue
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CLASS in /home/rfmaf0/public_html/fetchr4ssp/includes/fetchr.class.php on line 10
My php version is 4.47. Is the PHP5 a must? I saw you mentioned you have a PHP4 version. I bought the personal version but can’t run the fetchr4ssp.php still…
Please help..
Leon
@timothy West & Leon Chen
Yes, PHP5 is required — I wasn’t kidding when I put it in the pre-requisites.
But alas, I have a special file I coded up just for PHP4 folks. Send me an email from the address you used to acquire Fetchr4SSP and ask for the PHP4 version and I’ll send it to you.
Hi – Great piece of software here, Just a quick question: How would you go about, pulling a specific date out?
Eg my photos for 25 December 2007 across different sets.
Is this possible?
Many thanks
Gorm
I have SSP Director, SSP for Lightroom, and WP.. I don’t have SSP for Flash.. Can I still up this nifty WP plugin?
@Christine
I’m not very familiar with how SSP Director or SSP for Lightroom work.
Fetchr4SSP is not a WP-plugin, although the way it appears here that might be deceptive.
Fetchr4SSP’s end product is a configurable, self-updating XML file of your Flickr photos… perfectly formatted to “feed” into SSP for Flash. Now, it may be that the other flavors of SSP also take the same XML format, in which case it would work for you, too.
You could always email me your XML images file and I could tell you if it’s compatible or not.
Hello,
First of all, Big up for your tool it is working great. I do have an issue though, and maybe this is happening because I’m misunderstanding something here. So I have this script that will clear the FlickR cache: http://rindra.com/fetch/fetchr4ssp.php?cache_refresh and this one is supposed to generate the XML for FlickR: http://rindra.com/fetch/fetchr4ssp.php?xml_refresh
The pb is the xml_refresh doesn’t return anything while the cache_refresh is working. Isn’t that supposed to render the old XML file while the cache_refresh process is working.
Thanks for you support.
Hi There, Looks great. Quick question before I buy. Are the set titles editabe? Curently I get ‘content from’ when pulling images from flickr. Can the image link on images back to flickr be disabled.?
Ta!
J
Yes, absolutely. If you check the instructions doc file it will explain how to set your own title. If you can’t find it let me know.
Hi,
First of all great product! I am a registered user of Fetchr4ssp and am using it in my new site (test version is here http://nicholasbreslow.com/test/) and am happy with the results so far.
I have one question though – is it possible to disable the ability for a user to click on the image and go to the Flickr page? I really want to keep them on my site and am worried that I will lose some visitors to Flickr if this feature is enabled. Thanks in advance – appreciate and help you can give.
Sincerely,
-Nick Breslow
Sorry – got that link wrong. There are just placeholder images up anyways. Here it is: http://blog.nicholasbreslow.com/test/
@Nick
I know I already responded via email.. but just so anyone else can read it, too, here’s what I said:
Great idea! It does not yet “disable” linking to Flickr… but that’s a great idea for an enhancement that I’d like to push out soon!
Has anyone experience the fact that their user id is being returned saying it doesn’t exist? I used a different flickr account for development but have since set up a new flickr account, got a new id, api key, and secret, and edited the .php page.
Once uploaded, I now get the error at the page below:
http://70.32.75.151/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php
If you go to my photostream and hit the orange rss button you can see my ID:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=33017559@N06&lang=en-us&format=rss_200
Thanks
Jeff
@Jeff
Are your accounts “PRO” accounts? If not then leave the value for “secret” blank. Let me know if that had any effect.
Very much appreciate your quick response!
That did it. Thanks for a great product and support!
Hello…
1. For some reason Fetchr4ssp does not show up in my WP plugins list in my wp 2.7 admin panel, I uploaded fetchr4ssp folder to
http://krizsa.com/wp-content/plugins/
___________________________
2. Also I’m having problems with:
http://krizsa.com/wp-content/plugins/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php
_______________
77935962@N00 is my user ID
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=77935962@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200
Help please?
Thank you!
@Christine
Fetchr isn’t a “plug-in” for WordPress, but an automated XML input file generator for SlideShowPro. As long as SlideShowPro can show up on your WordPress site (with the usual methods… embedding the Flash file into a page) then you’re fine and don’t need to specifically “activate” Fetchr as a plugin.
As for your other issue, for whatever reason your API calls to Flickr are getting instantly blocked. This is rare for users with Flickr Pro accounts like you have, but it does happen sometimes from your site host having web service calls “turned off” or “blocked” — which is fairly insane but usually they do it and wait until the site owner complains to turn this ability back on. If you contact them and say “Hey, I’m trying to make a web service call to Flickr’s API and it’s getting blocked” they usually take care of it right away.
Please email me at http://stevemooradian.com/contact-me for more troubleshooting. I want to get this working for you.
Hi,
I tried to get_token but got the error message “Oops! Flickr can’t find a valid callback URL. ”
I have a pro account and an api key and secret.
All my photos are private on Flickr, I am using the trial version of your software.
Thank you.
@Cameron
Email me at http://stevemooradian.com/contact-me the full URL of your “fetchr4ssp.php” file, and also make sure that this same URL is what you entered in for your API key.
I’m creating a site for my friend which I was building on his WordPress site to test (http://blog.nicholasbreslow.com/test/). Note that we are using placeholder images on the Flickr acccount for now, but they are still working. Everything was working fine until we went to move the site to a new server (www.nicholasbreslow.com). For some reason the images won’t load on the new site. Here are the direct links to the php pages:
http://blog.nicholasbreslow.com/test/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php
http://www.nicholasbreslow.com/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php
Two ideas I’ve had:
1. Maybe Flickr logged the IP address of the test site and won’t accept the API calls from the new host because the IP doesn’t match.
2. Something from the WordPress setup was allowing the plugin to work, but it isn’t present on the new server.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
@Craig
The two ideas you had shouldn’t ever be a problem.
It looks like the server you migrated to might only be running PHP4 (rather than 5)… this is very bad, but usually you have the option in your control panel (or via bugging the tech support) to switch to PHP5. This is the HIGHLY recommended solution. I do have a PHP4 version “cobbled” together for folks who are stuck with PHP4. Let me know.
The server is supposedly a Linux server running PHP 5.1.6:
http://nicholasbreslow.com/info.php
Hmmm…
@Craig
Then it must be something else… send me an email with your main file (fetchr4ssp.php) cut and pasted in and we’ll work through it.
Thanks for an awesome piece of software! Works perfectly.
I’m trying out the trial version to see if it fits my needs, but I’m getting white boxes where my pictures are supposed to be. The PHP is definitely working, as is the XML. I can actually see the picture load at first, but then it fades to white, rather than fading the picture in. (There’s only two pictures currently – I’m still working on my Flickr collection.)
http://mannieschumpert.com/slideshow/
I like the product! I hope it works out for me.
awesome! this is exactly what i had been looking for. it is working perfectly. thank you for creating this great tool.
may i tip in, Mannie, i’m not sure if you’ve solved the problem already, but i first got the same error after i turned “smoothing” on in the SSP. the smoothing works only in the ActionScript3.0. see this SSP user forum for more info.
http://forums.slideshowpro.net/viewtopic.php?id=14459
Hi there. Sorry to say I am having a mare setting up your product which I bought a few hours ago. i have copied all the files to my server and edited the included fetchr4ssp.php file (with the minimum number of changes).
Something has not gone right, because slideshow pro comes up with no albums or images, but does load the navigator after 15 seconds or so.
I went to my fetchr4ssp.php file in firefox and there is probably around 100 errors. Key repeated phrases are
“Permission denied”, “…public_html/fetchr4ssp/includes/phpFlickr/phpFlickr.php”, “on line 182″, “supplied argument is not a valid stream resource”, “on line 83″, “on line 84″.
I have checked all my configurations in the php file and on flick API_key. And my server PHP is 5.2.8.
Having had a look now at some other people’s working “fetchr4ssp.php” files I can safely say mine is all wrong. It doesn’t come up as an xml file at all!
Here’s the URL: http://www.switchlan.co.nz/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php
Ok well I have finally fixed it, albeit somewhat clumsily.
But for future interest here’s what I had to do: Firstly I ended up changing the permissions on just about everything in the fetchr4ssp directory to 0777 (full control). Some of it may not have needed doing, but I’m not sure what. After this there was still one remaining error about not being able to find “images.xml”. As I couldn’t find the file in any of the folders I created a blank one.
And then everything was fixed.
Cheers for the program – just what I was looking for.
@Jared
I’m glad you got it working fine. FYI, when you use a browser to look at the XML make sure the browser isn’t attempting to render it… otherwise it WILL look pretty funky. IE is known for stunts like that.
It sounds like your host has some very peculiar settings with regard to file permissions… but that was good thinking putting in a blank images.xml file to start. I might put one in the installation package in case others have the same problem.
Hi,
I downloaded thet trial to see if I could get it working and such before I buy it – but I seem to be just getting errors with the fetch2ssp.php file ( http://www.alessandrapitocco.com/gallery/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php )
In my error logs I get the following error:
[09-Feb-2009 20:53:12] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in /home/alessand/public_html/gallery/fetchr4ssp/fetchr4ssp.php on line 1
End when I look in the file, it seems to end quite abruptly at line 159, with no end PHP tags or anything – is part of the file missing!?
Thanks for any help
Lloyd
@Lloyd
PHP files that are all PHP code (or just end with PHP code) do not require a closing tag. Your problem sounds like what happens when people use PHP4.
I really should put a friendly “Hey, you’re using PHP4″ warning in there… but I feel goofy because that language isn’t even supported anymore.
I was also wondering: You had a request earlier about removing links from images so your viewers don’t leave your site. An alternative would be to link not to a page containing the image, but strictly to the image (you know, so it shows up in just an empty browser where people can right click and save the image but there is no other content to distract them).
Obviously some people might still read the address and realize they are now on flickr. But most wouldn’t know/bother/care.
Would you consider adding this option? Or how might I try something like that?
Cheers
@WarAxe
Hmm, interesting, the server I’m using has PHP 5.2.6 installed, so it shouldn’t be a version problem…
@Jared
Email me and I can tell you how to do that… it’s not hard.
@Lloyd
Your webhost should have given you access to a “phpinfo.php” file. This file tells you about EVERYTHING having to do with your web server (including the version in BIG numbers at the top). Could you send me the URL to it?
Yeah, the last person who had that problem also told me that they were using PHP 5.2.5 …but they weren’t.
I should have tried the trial version before buying it. Does this error generated by my php file mean it’s blocked by my host?