FeedAPI + Flickr: Is there a guide?

You can find it here http://drupal.org/node/326601. It has some good info. There are some tutorials at the end but not sure they will address your use case with Flickr. I have done it as a test of the embedded image media field patch that was recently rolled into the development version of Feed Element Mapper. Not sure if it's been committed to the latest stable release. Anyway, here is my test feed in D6 http://d6.metanomy.org/?q=feed-item/63

You will need (I am running all the latest dev versions in Drupal 6.6):
-FeedAPI
-Feed Element Mapper
-CCK
-Embedded Media Field
-SimplePie if you are not on PHP 5 (or you just want extra features)
-Views if you want to customize the output into something like a gallery.

This really needs to go in a tutorial and or handbook page so here's the short version:
-Once you have all the stuff above installed and enabled you can start having fun...
-Create a content type that can be used as a feed item - Call it Flickr Items if you like but anything will do. FeedAPI can parse your feed and create nodes using this content type. It should not be marked as a FeedAPI content type - that's only for parent feeds; you are creating a content type that FeedAPI will use to create nodes.
-Save It.
-Goto Manage Fields tab and add an embedded media field (of the image variety) to hold your Flickr photo. Make sure you have configured embedded media field to allow Flickr content (under Admin). This field will be used later to map the feed item.
Save It.
-Goto Dispay Fields tab and select how you want the teaser and node image to be handled. In your case something like thumb with link to original.
-Now you are ready to try a feed. I used an RSS from a channel, but I would think about any would do. Go to Create Content and add a Feed. Fill in the Title and url for the feed - the body will be automatically populated with some RSS info. Under the FeedAPI processor settings point it at your Flickr Item content type. You are telling the Feed to create Flickr Items as nodes when processing the feed.
-Save It.
-Goto the Map tab. Under Description of available mappers you should see something like this "field_emimage (emimage module)"; if you don't somethings not right. Go back and check my confusing instructions against your reality.
-If you do see it then woohoo! Go down a bit further and you should be able to see options->original_url: and a drop down. In that drop down you should be able to map that sucker to your embedded image media field.
-Save It.
-Now you should be able to hit Refresh and the feed will be parsed/processed and a bunch of new Flickr Item nodes created.
-Enjoy
-Optionally you can get into Views and create galleries etc.
Note: If you are running PHP 5 you can use Common Syndication Parser but you may want to try SimplePie as it has a bit more features. BUT Common Syndication Parser should be enough to get the fields you need for Flickr. The cool part is if you run SimplePie you might be able to get the geo tags from the GeoRSS feed and map them to Location, but that's another tutorial.

Hope that helps!
Regards,
Coby
Metanomy.org

I'm going to have one of our developers work on this in the upcoming week, so please check back later for updates.

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

We're in the process of implementing a new system for handling images in emfield, including making feedapi work a little more seamlessly with emimage. We should have something released by Thursday, though it may not have all the functionality yet, but either way I think you're wasting your time trying to work around a feature we're about to improve.

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

Yea, seems I couldn't use that the way I wanted to...thanks coby for taking the time to check it out!

What is usually the symptom when there is no image field to map under the map view of a feed?

When we were testing matt's setup the Atom feed from a Flickr pool had the image URL but the mapper could not get to it. Last I checked there were a few patches floating around that helped FeedAPI support drill down into RAW data and enclosures in a feed but have lost track of status. Too many things going on and I am not an XML feed expert. I did get a chance to make my own parser to handle a special use case so know it could be done. Just need to get the parser to loop deep enough into the right arrays and pass that data to mapper. In this case it's the image array in the pool feed I believe. The url to the image is there just not made available to the mapper because it's about two levels deep. And then I am not sure emiamge would like the url that is there.

Sorry to the Group here. This thread turned into something that's probably better placed in an issue queue.

On that note - Matt, if you are still having specific tech issues we should move over to the Feed API and/or Mapper queue with detailed issues.

R,
Coby

Hello all, I was wondering if it's possible to do the same thing, but using imagecache so i can have thumbnails the way I need them. I'm building a small site for the bike messenger company I work for and I would love to grab all flickr content from everybody, but the flickr thumbnals break the layout.

see : http://velocite.ch/10ans/photos as you can see there, some pictures are "higher" than others cause they are vertical, and this is not good cause I want to use a bigger thumbnail size and it creates a lot of whitespace.

So my idea was to see if it's possible to feed flickr rss items directly into an image field that would in turn use imagecache to create derivatives...

Is there any chance this could work? Anyone ever tried that??

Thanks,
Patchak

Quick update with where I'm at. On my production site, it seems upgrading to the following recently released modules has worked:

FeedAPI 6.x-1.5
Embedded Media Field 6.x-1.x-dev (2008-Nov-20)
Feed Element Mapper 6.x-1.0-beta3

The only issue is, not all of the nodes created by the feed are displaying images. When i run the feed, it populates 20 items. However, only 9 of the items actually has populated a thumbnail from flickr. So this is a start in the right direction.

Can I ask how people forumulate their flickr rss links? It's possible I'm not doing it right like I did when i first started by using groups - now using tags.

I'm using: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=SEARCH-TERM-...