A small furor erupted some weeks ago when Flickr announced its API was changing to all SSL. On account of this the myriad of WordPress plugins which allow viewing of Flickr photos through WordPress had to change their code just a bit. This happened at the same time I first started exploring WordPress/Flickr plugins, so many of the plugins abandoned by their developers no longer worked. After exploring one Flickr plugin after another at wordpress.org I eventually discovered that the leading plugin of this genre, which appeared to have been abandoned by its developer had actually moved its updates to github. This was on account of some kind of licensing issue.
Adapting the Awesome Flickr Gallery (AFG) (wish I didn’t hate the “awesome” name for it) with the Divi theme returned a decent, clean look, but as for content must use two approaches.
Everything at sorabji.com/pictures should eventually make it to flickr, and thus to pictures.sorabji.com. Everything under sorabji.com/pictures uses the Gallery2 software, a well-made package I always respected but which has seen its developers move on to Gallery3 with no path to migrate Gallery2’s very sophisticated (if somewhat bloated) system of item-level permissions. That was key to me and why I stuck G2 as long as I did.
Gallery2 is equipped with a plugin allowing me to move all photos over to Flickr, though that comes at the expense of losing the original filenames to Flickr’s unreadable filenames. I may use this option anyway, since there is no reason the EXIF data (including original filename) should not carry over to Flickr.
Additionally, of the thousands of images I have stored on Flickr I want to make some available at pictures.sorabji.com but leave most of them private (most of the thousands of images I store on Flickr are private. As a long-time paying Pro customer I was grandfathered in with unlimited storage as long as I keep paying, which I don’t mind doing.)
There are most likely other ways to do it, but one solution to the public/private thing actually works well for me.
I created an invitation-only group at Flickr, copied selected photos marked “private” from my photostream into that group, and voila, I was able to access them through AFG by selecting “Group” and then the group name as the gallery source.
This required that I fix a strange bug that I could not figure out. To access my invitation-only group through AFG I would need access to my private photos. This required that I enter my “Secret” Flickr API key. I entered the secret key and clicked “Grant Access” but only received the unhelpful error message “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” Very odd, since I could find no mention of this error under this circumstance anywhere in the support forums.
Only by chance did I happen to notice something wrong with the URL which returned this error. The URL, in part, looked like this:
The letters “rfg” are what caught my attention. I don’t know how or why this was wrong but that part of the URL query string should read afg, as in Awesome Flickr Gallery. RFG was the abbreviation for Responsive Flickr Gallery, a product which I also installed and used for a bit, and which looks virtually identical to AFG on both the front and back ends. The only difference I can recall between the two is the AdSense integration in RFG. I don’t know how the two installations could have gotten mixed up, or if it’s some weird caching thing, but I’m glad to say I figured it out all by my bad self.
