1. Go to Flickr.com and sign in (create a free account there if you don’t have one already)
2. Join the Miami & The Beaches Group there
3. It’s crazy but here’s how it works – we use the Flickr API to pull the Miami & The Beaches Group there back over here to this site to our own customized gallery.
Why?
Convenience, style and simplicity.
About The Group Pool
The Miami & The Beaches Flickr group is for photos that pertain specifically to Miami and the surrounding metro area, and its beaches, hotels, nitelife, culture, events, nature and architecture.
WordPress RSS Posts
We also pull the Miami & The Beaches Flickr group RSS feed into this site not just as a gallery api pull but as Posts. Huh? The Recent Posts you see in the left column – the only group pool we actually add as Posts is our own. Our group pool is the only RSS feed pulled on a regular basis using Feedpress. Flickr tends to throttle the RSS feeds pulled by Feedpress, so the posts are not as inclusive as we’d like. The reason we don’t pull the other groups is because we cannot control the content. We actually had Feedpress pulling them in, but often the content was unrelated because these other groups are not being moderated closely, and we’d get photos that really weren’t related.
So what’s the difference between Posts and The Flickr Galleries? The Posts become a more permanent part of the site, and you can go back through the archives by date. The Flickr Galleries are present tense views of the groups’ pool on Flickr and show only the most recent 100 or so images, and they are constantly changing. The images we pull into the galleries are not stored on the site, and stay linked to Flickr.
Posts stay linked to Flickr also, but the post with the link to Flickr is archived. If an archived post points to an image on Flickr and the image is removed from Flickr, it’s not something we can control.
The Flickr Galleries – phpFlickr
All the Flickr galleries use on-demand pulls using phpFlickr, and show the most recent 100 or so posts. If you’d like to set this up on your own site, let me know. More examples of how this works – http://miamitom.com – there are several specific galleries there that pull from Flickr. You can choose to pull specific photostreams, sets, groups.
Using Networked Blogs on Facebook, we pull our Posts into Facebook automatically, so be sure to connect with us on Facebook. For more information about all the cool automation this site has going on, go to http://miamitom.net/socialmedia.html.
Other Flickr Groups About Miami
When you search Flickr for groups, you’ll find quite a few about Miami, and often the tendency for people is to join whatever they find or what their friends are connected to. The Miami & The Beaches Flickr group is moderated so that it truly contains mainly photography about Miami & The Beaches, and we’re pretty watchful about what’s in it.
If we’ve ever dropped some of your photos from our group – it was because the photos were not related specifically enough – not because of their artistic value.
These other groups tend to be less moderated and the content is often not necessarily about Miami – it may be a Miami group, but often the photography there could have been photographed anywhere – especially the models. We love the models, but that’s not what the site is about. Drop your images into these groups and you’ll see them here also, only in the Flickr Galleries, not posts. Anyway, enjoy these other groups:
- Miami & All Things About It - a huge established group with over a thousand members, this group has a wider range, unmoderated.
- Miamisms – (Site: http://www.miamism.com/ ) Miami real estate, general interest, social networking – lightly moderated.
- Shoot Miami Meetup Group (Flickr) - (Site: http://www.meetup.com/shootmiami/ ) Miami general interest. If you’re just getting into photography, this is a great group. Field trips to local events and photographer networking. Group includes, pro, semi-pro, artists, amateurs and general interest photographers. (Moderated)
- Miami Beach - yet another group on Flickr with just under 200 members, and features even more Miami Beach photography.(Lightly moderated)