WordPress Flickr Manager now with Lightbox Support

It’s a bit of a rushed release because I’m pretty busy at the moment, so I didn’t have time to test it as much as I would have liked. I introduced a couple new features to Flickr Manager in this release, the main one being optional Lightbox support. You’ll notice now on the “Browse Photos” tab an added “Insert with lightbox support” check box. When this is selected, the inserted image will display the Medium Flickr sized copy of the photo in the Lightbox window. This means if you insert a square, thumbnail or small image it will display a larger version when viewing the Lightbox image. It also allows you to specify which images load with Lightbox and which don’t. For Example:

WordPress Flickr Manager v1.4.0b Browse Panel
CLICK ME! I do stuff.

WordPress Flickr Manager v1.4.0b Browse Panel
I’m boring and just take you to Flickr

Also another feature I added was if you don’t have cURL installed on your web host it will now use fopen instead.
NOTE: File uploads to Flickr won’t work unless you have cURL installed. So if everything is working except uploads, you must install cURL!

Like I said earlier, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to test this so I’m releasing it as a beta. If you find any errors, please let me know. Thanks.

[download#2#image]

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35 Responses to WordPress Flickr Manager now with Lightbox Support

  1. Hi Trent
    That is great, I only asked about adding this feature about 8 hours ago and bang, its there.
    thanks a million 🙂
    Phil
    http://www.alpesinfo.com – computer support and website design

  2. Hi Trent
    I have just been trying it out and it works great, just one request though. Every time you do something like skip to the next page, or change the size of the picture the lightbox checkbox becomes unchecked, could it be made to retain state?
    Cheers
    Phil
    http://www.alpesinfo.com – computer support and website design

  3. Hi Trent
    Another comment, it looks like you have built lightbox into it. In my case I already have lightbox installed so just need the rel=”lightbox” adding to the inserted picture link. Might it not be better to do it like this anyway and just let the user know that they will need to install lightbox or a lighbox plugin as well?
    Cheers
    Phil
    http://www.alpesinfo.com – computer support and website design

  4. Phillip,

    I have just been trying it out and it works great, just one request though. Every time you do something like skip to the next page, or change the size of the picture the lightbox checkbox becomes unchecked, could it be made to retain state?

    Thanks for pointing that out, I always intended for that to be the case, must have forgotten. I’ll fix it in the next release.

    Another comment, it looks like you have built lightbox into it. In my case I already have lightbox installed so just need the rel=”lightbox” adding to the inserted picture link. Might it not be better to do it like this anyway and just let the user know that they will need to install lightbox or a lighbox plugin as well?

    The reason I built it into my plugin was because I had to customize the Lightbox script a little i.e you’ll note that the link around the image still links back to the Flickr photo page rather than just to the image file directly as to not breach the Flickr community guidelines. Plus now you don’t need the lightbox plugin installed as a prerequisite to use my plugin.

  5. Phillip,
    I just took it out of beta, and now it saves the checkbox state for you, and there’s also an ‘Optional Settings’ section in the Options->Flickr page that allows you to set how many photos per page.

    Trent.

  6. Beck says:

    I installed the plug-in but it doesn’t work properly. I use firefox 2.0 with Mac OS X 10.4

    The panel shows up on my admin page alright, but if I clicked on ‘browse’, the wheel keeps spinning and nothing happens. My Firefox firebug returns the following error:

    Ajax is not defined
    Line 40
    var flickr_ajax = new Ajax.Updater({success: destId}, url, {method: ‘get’, parameters: query, onFailure: function(){ returnError(destId); }})

  7. John says:

    This is great; out of all the other plugins I tried, this actually worked on the first install. Could you manage to add an option to open all images in a new window? I currently have to edit each image tag to add the target=”_blank” code. Kind of a pain when you’ve got a lot of thumbnails.

  8. John,
    I’ll add it in the next update under the ‘Optional Settings’ section in the options tab.

  9. Beck says:

    I downloaded the latest version from wordpress plugin (v1.4) and it didn’t work, and I downloaded it from your website (v1.2.1) and the same problem persists. Here’s the error message I got again: (firefox 2.0.0.11, Mac osX 10.4.11)

    Ajax is not defined
    ln40:
    var flickr_ajax = new Ajax.Updater({success: destId}, url, {method: ‘get’, parameters: query, onFailure: function(){ returnError(destId); }});

  10. Beck says:

    aaaah sorry, nevermind my previous comments. I realized yahoo’s wordpress is v2.0. After I upgraded wordpress everything works. I love this plugin. Thank you!

  11. John says:

    I can’t wait. Thanks Trent . . .

  12. Becky says:

    Hi Trent,

    Another dumb question..

    So when I drag and drop the pics, it only shows the http address of the pic in my editor. I have to add additional link and img html code for every picture. Is that the way it’s supposed to behave?

    Also, checking “lightbox support” does nothing to me. From your blog post i;m not sure if this will take effect on the editor side or blog viewing side, but it does nothing to me on both sides, even after i added rel=”lightbox” to the link.

    Thanks in advance for your help!

  13. Hey John,
    Version 1.4.01 should now have an option to add target=”_blank” to links. It also fixes a compatibility issue with the Lightbox JS WordPress Plugin, as well as allowing insertion directly into the code view of the tinyMCE editor.

    Trent.

  14. Becky,
    Firstly, you don’t drag and drop images to insert them, just click on it and it will be inserted with all the necessary tags wrapped around it. This is also why your lightbox attribute isn’t being inserted, because for my plugin it’s actually rel=”flickr-mgr” due to a few development issues with the Flickr community guidelines.

    I hope that helps you.
    Trent

  15. Becky says:

    Thanks for your prompt response. That worked!

    Another thing to point out, I didn’t realize it only works if the visual editor is enabled. I figured that out after looking at your screenshots more closely. Without the visual mode enabled, I could only drag and drop. You might want to add that in your documentation .

    I love this plugin, thanks a lot!

  16. Hi Becky,

    I wasn’t aware it wasn’t working when the tinyMCE editor was disabled. If you redownload it from WordPress extend it should now work.

    Thanks for your help,
    Trent.

  17. Hi Trent

    A couple of little things. After inserting a picture the insertion point stays in the the anchor tag so when you type some text, or even a space, after a pic then it is part of the same link.

    The other thing is that the lightbox support does not seem to pull any text from the title or the description

    Cheers

    Phil
    http://www.alpesinfo.com – Computer support and website design

  18. Hi Phillip,
    Redownload of WordPress extend, that will fix both issues.

    Trent.

  19. I’m having trouble with the ‘browse public photos’ function. When making a post, I click on “Browse photos” and then on “Public”, and I get a seemingly random selection of 5 photos. Say I want to limit my public photo browsing to “Japanese apartments”. I type that into the filter box, and his Enter..the whole page refreshes and the browsing panel resets to default. Should this be the case? Is there any other plugin that allows you to browse the public photo directory and insert those photos into your posts?

  20. Adam,
    If you want to browse public photos, click public and then browse photos.

    If you want to limit it to “Japanese Apartments” type it into the filter box and click filter.

    Trent.

    Edit: If you redownload it off WordPress Extend, it will now catch the ‘Enter’ keystroke so you don’t have to click the filter button.

  21. shane says:

    Hey Trent,
    Great plugin. Love it.
    But is there anyway I could get lightbox to show the “large” or “_b” instead of the “medium” image.

    I noticed while using the original size in the post, when clicked lightbox will show the original size image. So I added the option to use the large image in the post and lightbox will show the large image. Only problem is I would like to use the medium image in my post, showing the large image with lightbox.

    I tried messing around with the “flickr_photo_url” function a little bit but I’m not that great with PHP and have been unsuccessful. Maybe the wrong place or maybe not possible?

    thanks,
    shane

    btw- should I not be messing around with stuff? sorry.

  22. Hey Shane,
    You want to play around with ‘lightbox/lightbox.php’ and the exact part you’re looking for is lines 309 – 314.

    I have plans to allow people to specify the size of the image displayed in lightbox, so if you can’t get it working just wait until I make the next major version release.

    Also you may want to note that not all images have a large sized image associated with it.

  23. shane says:

    Trent,
    got it! worked.
    thanks

    when I’m traveling all my originals will be big files so the large size option will always be availible.

    thanks again and I’ll keep checking in for new versions.
    -shane

  24. Sam Ritchie says:

    So I installed the new version of the plugin, but when I tried to activate in WordPress 2.3.3 I got this error–

    Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/content/k/a/y/kayakwcc/html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-flickr-manager/FlickrManager.php on line 32

    Any recommendations?

  25. Hi Sam,
    I made some changes, so try redownloading it from WordPress extend. If you still have any issues with it, try reverting to 1.4.5.

    At the moment 1.5.0a is a developmental release, which I made public to help me track bugs, because it’s practically a complete rewrite and tidy up of the old version I thought I found most of them but some may have slipped through.

  26. Eppie Vojt says:

    The filter function doesn’t work at all for me. It causes the entire page to reload instead of an AJAX call reloading the image browsing section. Any ideas?

  27. Eppie,
    Are you using the latest version 1.5.2?
    Is it just the filter function that doesn’t work, i.e can you go forward and backwards between the pages of photos?

    I just had a look at your site. I noticed you use photo dropper. That might be your problem, Photo Dropper is actually based on my code and there’s a conflict between the two because when they built it, they didn’t bother changing any of the function names. As of not long ago, I was asked to develop both plugins, so I’m going to fix the conflict with the next update. But for now if you disable Photo dropper, that will fix your problem (Flickr Manager has all the functionality of Photo Dropper anyway, just select “Public” in the browse panel).

  28. Eppie Vojt says:

    I have photo dropper disabled – only used it once and then disabled it. I’m using the most recent version of Flickr Manager, and I still have the problem with filtering. Switching pages works fine – the only problem is filtering.

  29. OK Eppie,
    I found your bug, so I’ve fixed it and if you redownload it from WordPress extend it should now work.

    Trent

  30. Eppie Vojt says:

    Trent,

    Just downloaded from WordPress extend and everything works famously! I must say, I’m very impressed with the plugin, and the fact that you were so responsive in correcting the bug. You’re awesome!

    ep

  31. Tom says:

    Hey Trent,

    Great job in working this flickr manager. I’ll be using it for my site!

    Thanks and keep up the great work!!

    Tom

  32. Joe Hamilton says:

    Hey Trent,
    thanks for the great plugin. I have one little problem similar to Shane. My images don’t have large versions so I would like to display the original image in the lightbox.

    I have tried modifying the code but i got a little lost. Any tips on where i should look for the code to change?

    thanks

  33. JoJo says:

    Hello,
    am loving this plug-in so far!
    Just was trying to modify the Flickr Manager to display my flickr “favorites” or “groups” instead of my own stream.

    Could you direct me where to look to modify this.
    It would really be helpful.

  34. Joe says:

    Hi Trent,

    first of all this is an amazing plugin. I really love the features and I especially wanted to thank for being so responsive and even quick in coming back to user questions and bug supports. This is not very common among most programmers (although I do realize that most people have a real life indeed and do the coding only in their spare time).

    Second I wanted to ask if it would be possible to add some sort of preview gallery to the lightbox. I will try to explain what I mean.

    On every flickr photo page there are all sets displayed on the right side of the website which contain the current image. It would be highly superior if at least one set (even the main photostream would do the trick) could be displaied in the same light box as the actual image. It would not be necessary that there are actual links to the images nor would they need to have discriptions or titles on them. Just three or so tiny thumnbnails – teasers if you will – to lead the reader to the flickr page.

    Just a thought though it might be quite tricky to implement.

    Have a great day and thanks for your already amazing plugin!

    -Joe-

  35. sidd says:

    hi there,

    great plugin i have one problem , the way the plugin displays image it makes the 9 images looks like they are in one box no space between the images can anyone tell me how to make the space between images so hat it can look more attractive.

    Thanks for Help ……….

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