Improving Your Flickr Experience

If you use a Firefox it is possible to install scripts that make little improvements to the Flickr user interface. All you need to do is install a plugin called Greasemonkey which allows you to install scripts and even write your own. Once you have installed greasmonkey, you can head over to userscripts.org and search for handy scripts to use with flickr or any other web site that you fancy.

Here are some of my favourite flickr greasemonkey scripts

Flickr Embed

This script is useful if you are blogging photos, because it creates a textbox on image pages that contains the html for embedding it in posts.

Flickr Exif Info

This one is pretty straightforward. It displays some key information from the exif data directly on the image page, so that I don't have to go click on the more info link to see the key settings of a photograph.

Flickr Show all images by this user in this pool

On the face of it this script sounds like its not much use. I installed it to help me keep to the posting limit in a group pool. The group only allowed 20 images from each use in the pool. With this script I could click on one image of mine in the pool and then follow a new link under my name on the image page, which would allow me to see all the images I had put in the pool. Where it comes in handy is if you see an image you like in a large pool like the strobist pool, you can then find all the images that user has posted there. This is better than just looking at their stream because the images from the pool are more targeted to what you want to look at.

Flickr Auto Page

I have mixed feelings about this script. Sometimes it is very useful other times it's annoying. Fortunately its very easy to enable and disable scripts though the greasemonkey menu. The flickr Auto Page script is designed to stop you from ever having to hit the "next" button. When you scroll to the bottom of a page, the script automatically fetches the next page and displays it on the current page. Very handy for looking through photostreams and group pools.

Flickr Quoter

This script makes it easy for you to quote people. It adds a quote link at the bottom of forum posts and comments. If you click on the quote link it puts the quote in the message box and formats it nicely for you.

There are loads of scripts to choose from and rolling your own isn't difficult if you know a little javascript. If you use another browser, then its not quite as easy. Google Chrome has some limited support for user scripts but you need to use the developers version and some of the more sophisticated scripts are unlikely to work. I believe that Safari users can also get Greasemonkey working using software called GreaseKit, but you'll have to find out how yourself.

What scripts do you use? Drop me a comment.

Here is a screen shot showing embed and exif info for Paul Mason