Add Creative Commons Photos from Flickr to a Wordpress Blog with Photo Dropper

Photo Dropper is a Wordpress plugin that searches the Flickr database for photos published under a Creative Commons License, the photos can then be added to any Wordpress blog post.

Photo Dropper will search Flickr for tags that comply with your search term and show thumbnails of the images it finds in the Wordpress dashboard. The user is offered three different size images – small, medium or large – by way of a link to each one. There is also a link to the original photo on Flickr so you can check that out before adding the image to your blog post. This is a very handy function as the image dimensions are not visible in the Wordpress dashboard, and as all images are different sizes and all Wordpress themes are not the same, your post could look a little wonky if the image used is too large.

I have taken the plugin for a test run and found it to be great in principle, but a little awkward in practice. I have recently written a post about the Arctic Monkeys movie so I thought I would try to get some photos for that using Photo Dropper. The search term would obviously be “Arctic Monkeys”, the first four photos returned were completely irrelevant:

I performed the search again and this time the Photo Dropper plugin got it spot on and returned about thirty results. I could then select the photos I wanted for the post. I had to be careful though, remember, the plugin is looking for Flickr tags. This means you are relying on the person who has posted the photos to apply relevant tags. The thumbnails used in the results are quite small and I almost added an image of The Rascals instead of the Arctic Monkeys. Luckily, the link to the external photo allowed me to check the photo before adding it. I could also check the exact dimensions size of the small, medium and large version to see which would be the most applicable for the theme I am using.

This is an example of the Photo Dropper plugin in use:

photo credit: mdesisto

photo credit: Tawakol

photo credit: edwardkimuk

Very impressive! The keywords used here were sky, sea and earth. The plugin will aslo be any acreditation stipulated by the photographer across to the site, thus comply with the attributes of the Creative Commons License.

I have grown to expect a certain degree of quirkiness when using Wordpress and the various plugins made available by the good people who wish to develop the community. Photo Dropper has been a little iffy in places, but overall I have found it be an excellent addition to my Wordpress plugin arsenal. It certainly beats going across to Flickr every time I need an image for a post and I can’t see myself deactivating the plugin in the near future. Compatible with Wordpress 2.6.1 at least (I haven’t updated to 2.6.2 yet).

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