Jul
25

Flickr + Twitter = Flic.kr

Photography, Projects

I’ve been lately noticing more and more people on twitter using URLs with the flic.kr domain as short ULRs for their pictures on flickr so I decided to do some research and find out how they did this.

It turned out that the short URL of every picture is provided by flickr and is included in the HTML code of the flickr page page itself.

To find out the code to your picture here is what you should do

  1. Open the flickr page of your desired picture, e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/akhater/3188623049/ 
    N.B.: make sure not to include any /in/set-xxxx in the URL, for e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/akhater/3188623049/in/set-72157600048927403/ will not work, you should stop before the in/set-xxxx part

  2. Right click –> View source

  3. Now search for the “flic.kr” string you should find something like
    <link rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://flic.kr/p/5RLwxt" >

  4. I think you guessed that you only need to copy the red part of the code above, this is your short flickr URL

Now if you happen to use firefox and Greasemonkey you will only need to download and install this script that will display the current photo's flic.kr link on the page. A worthwhile script to be added Top 10 greasemonkey scripts for flickr.

More on flickr shortening service


8 people have commented on this post so far! Leave a Comment
  • Jeff

    You can also go under your account and set Twitter up as a blog , then just hit blog this from above the image itself

    • @Jeff, WOW ! I didn’t know it can be done 🙂 Going to try it right now

      Thanks for the tip

  • Tom

  • i love the flickr blog post feature for twitter and my blog… yeah, as jeff stated, you can just click the “blog this” icon above the image and choose the blog you want to post to. you can add several blogs, as i have done. however, i’ve noticed that when i post to my photoblog http://www.seanjonesfoto.com, flickr or my blog host (blogger) crops my photos that are “blogged” from twitter. does anyone know why? because of this cropping, i’ve only blogged a few pics to my blog from flickr, and i continue to upload directly to the blog from my hd. flickr gets better everyday… 🙂

    keep up the great work with the blog!

    ~peace

    sean

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  • I thought I was going crazy for a moment, as I couldn’t find this for the life of me.

    In the end I found it.

    Just wish flickr would include this on-page anyway, as it makes good sense. No doubt with the tide of people using this link on twitter growing, they’ll most likely do just that in the near future.

  • finally you have given me the answer, this was something I have been trying to figure out for some time…thanks