The Flickr slideshow plugin has various settings to configure the plugin to meet your needs. In this article we elaborate on all the plugin settings and explain what they do.
The first 4 parameters of the basic options are fields related to the flickr API:
Our installation tutorial has a step by step approach on how to obtain these details.
The Flickr API is rather slow. To minize loading times, the plugin features a cache option that stores the results it obtains from flickr in the local database. When the same call is requested, the plugin simply loads the results from the database instead of waiting for flickr, saving precious time as we don't want a visitor of your website waiting for too long for the photos to pop up. The downside of this can be that if you upload photos to flickr, the results are not displayed instantly on your webpage.
The "caching time" setting allows you to set the time (in seconds) for which the plugin will use the data in the database before it will refresh the results. The default value of this setting is 86400, which corresponds to 24 hours. When changing the value to 0, the cache function will be disabled.
To obtain information from flickr, the plugin supports 2 connection methods. cURL should work in most cases. In case you have the idea that the plugin is having problems connecting to flickr (for example because your provider has disabled the use of cURL or has a strickt firewall policy), please switch to Sockets. The Sockets implement could work when the use of cULR fails and the sockets implementation has a more elaborate implementation for error handling.
Flickr allows you to set privacy levels on the photos on your account to enable you to hide photos from the general public and make them available for specific groups of people. The plugin supports this feature and enables you to display all the photos on your account (even the ones set to private) on your website. This option sets the default privacy level for the photos displayed on your website. You can overrule this setting with the privacy attribute as explained here.
The flickr slideshow plugin comes with the highly popular Highslide image viewer. It is possible that you already have highslide installed on your website and that you are using it with other extensions as well. This option allows you to control whether the plugin should embed the Highslide javascript and css files.
To display photos and thumbnails on your website, the plugin comes with 3 different styles:
Below are 3 examples of how the 3 differen styles look.
| Image examples | thumbnail examples |
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Plugins in Joomla all use different formats of codes for their users to embed in their articles. By default, this plugin uses the [ ] brackets for the code expressions, for example:
[flickr set=123456789098765]
The { } brackets are quite frequently used by other plugins as well. This setting allow you to switch from the default [ ] brackets to the { } brackets.
