Greasing Up Your Flickr Monkey
February 14th, 2009
Some of you may or may not know I started working on a 365 Project , where I take a self portrait each day and post the picture up on different flickr groups. I have been a little addicted to flickr since then and have installed numerous Greasemonkey scripts to enhance my flickr experience.
“Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way web pages look and function. Hundreds of scripts are already available for free. And if you’re the tinkerer sort, you can also write your own.” (Taken directly from its site.)
Installing Greasemonkey
Before you are able to use the scripts I describe below you have to be using Firefox and have Greasemonkey installed. You can get it here. Just click on the ‘Add to Firefox’ button. A dialog window will pop up making sure that you want to install this extension. Accept it. You will need to restart Firefox before you can start using Greasemonkey. Once Firefox has restarted you will see a little happy monkey face on your status bar. Once you see that, you are good to go.
Flickr Auto Page
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8594
This is by far my favorite GM script for Flickr. It makes browsing through large “collections” of photos really easy. Instead of having to click next at the bottom of the page, one just continues to scroll and this script will load the next page automatically at the bottom of the current page.
Flickr Refer Comment
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4203
On any page that there is a comment text box for a picture, this script populates the comment box with where you came from, and a link to it, so that the owner of the picture knows how you found it. So for instance, if you found the picture in a group it will populate the comment box with, “Seen in the group {group name}”, and link to it. I like knowing how people find my pictures, and this help me let others know how I found their pictures.
This script does require some customization if you don’t want to add refer comments to you own pictures. This is pretty straight forward.
Right click on the greasemonkey icon on your status bar and choose “Manage User Scripts…”.
Then select the “Flickr Refer Comment” script.
Add an exclude page with the following pattern:
http://flickr.com/photos/{flickr id}
So for instance, my username is civrot so mine looks like:
http://flickr.com/photos/civrot
Hit “Ok”, and then “Close”, and the script will no longer populate the comment box for your pictures.
Flickr Buddy Icon Reply
http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrhacks/discuss/72157605959212132/
This script is also related to comments. It adds three new links next to each comment allowing one to personalize a reply to each comment. The three new links are:
reply with:
- name – populates the comment box with the user’s name in bold
- icon – populates the comment box with the user’s icon
- name&icon – I am pretty sure you can figure out what this one does
This script makes it easier to scan down a thread of comments and see who has replied to who.
Flickr Exif Decorator
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9476
This script is rather simple and elegant. It displays a summary of EXIF data for the current photo on the top left corner when you rollover it. If you want more detailed information you can just click the ‘more’ link on the rollover or the ‘More properties’ link already provided by flickr.
Flickr More Sparkles
http://6v8.gamboni.org/Flickr-More-Sparkles.html
This last script adds little spark lines next to each image, so you can quickly see its current stats, for the past 28 days.
There are some other scripts that I use on and off, but these are currently my top five for flickr. These scripts have made my flickr experience that much more enjoyable. I hope they enhance your flickr experience too.
