For some time now, I have been frustrated by the gallery plugins that I have been using. For one thing they don’t seem to have worked very well, but more than that I have found it frustrating duplicating photos across multiple sites. I have this blog here, where I like to show what I have been up to, but I also have a Flickr account and a Facebook account. I feel like I shouldn’t have to upload the same photos to all three. So what I have been looking for is a WordPress gallery plugin that could link to photo sets on Flickr. And at last it seems that a few options are available.

I have been playing with a few today, and I think I have found one that works just how I want it to. My personal winner is the Flickr Gallery plugin for WordPress. You can also check out the Flickr Gallery project web site for more detail.

All you need to do is install it, request a Flickr API key (these cost nothing for personal or small business use) and put it in your configuration. Then whenever you want a post to show a Flickr photo set as a gallery, you just put in a tag like this:
[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157625782372674"]
… to see this:

It’s not limited to photo sets. You can show specific photos, your photostream, galleries based on tags and more.

And in case you were wondering, I have no connection to the developer of this plugin. I just feel that such a handy plugin merits any publicity I can give it.

Coincidentally, I also upgraded to Aperture 3 this morning, which enables me to upload a group of photos to a Flickr set in about 2 clicks. Managing photos and publishing them online is starting to feel frictionless.