szelee

Although slightly long overdue, the brand new Flickr slideshow feature is still very much welcomed. Embedding Flickr set to external sites has just become slightly more user-friendly, and the full screen feature is very much expected but appreciated.

One way to embed Flickr slideshow in blogs could be traced to Paul Stamatiou who investigated the API and showed how it could be done. Based on this idea, many sites like this and this offer auto generation of the HTML codes when the user inputs the name of the user and set. But the size of the slideshow was fixed at 500 pixels by 500 pixels.  When there are too many photos, thumbnails at the bottom carousel were scaled down too much to be useful for previewing when it goes beyond 2 rows. The new slideshow addresses many of these issues.

Currently, the new slideshow customization page can be accessed through these steps:

1. Go to any Flickr set
2. Click SlideShow on top right
3. Click Share on top right for a popup (of course, one can simply Grab the HTML at this step)
4. Click Customize this HTML

The faster way would be to postfix “show/?embed=1″ to the set’s hyperlink, e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/teoszelee/sets/72157605322795697/show/?embed=1.

There is nothing much really to customize in the page, except for the size of the slideshow (four preset sizes are provided). But a little digging into the HTML code generated can reveal some extra customizations. For example, setting name=”allowFullScreen” to false disable full screen mode, although the button is still visible (but this only works for IE, hmm…).

Some of the major differences are:

1. The old version autoplays the slideshow once the page is loaded. The new one begins in paused mode with an overlay of text – “<owner’s name>’s <set name> Slideshow on Flickr”. A play button is situated below the text to trigger the start of the slideshow.
2. The duration between slide changes can be set with a slider between 1 to 10 seconds in the old version. The new one reduces this to Slow, Medium and Fast radio button in Options popup.
3. Clicking on picture during the slideshow in the older version shrinks the picture and reveals the information and title.
   For the new version, there is no information shown for small and medium slideshow. Clicking on the image advances the slideshow to the next one.
   But for the large and supersize ones, clicking on any picture will show overlaying text information without image shrinking. Information can also toggled from the Info On/Off button at the top center of the image(only for large and supersize).
   Previous and next image button is also placed differently depending on the size chosen.
4. The carousel containing the thumbnails at the bottom panel of the embedded flash is now consistent with the default slideshow page in Flickr as well as the Organizr. It’s certainly more useful. Even the bigger thumbnail on mouse over is more slick with fade-in fade-out animation.

All in all, it is a big improvement.  But some suggestions won’t hurt:

1. Allow user to specify the default text on page load, or perhaps simply just show the name of the set.
2. The size for slideshow is currently set to 4:3 aspect ratio in the 4 preset sizes. For most DSLR users who shoot in 3:2 (landscape orientation), it creates unnecessary black bars on top and bottom. (No doubt, users can input the width and height of their desired aspect ratio to overcome this with some simple calculation).
3. One-click button from Flickr set to grab and customize the embedding HTML in blog.
4. Allow the slideshow to appear in Google Reader like the Flickr video. Update: the slideshow does appear in Google Reader now. Cool.