As I mentioned when I was writing about my new camera, I'm finding flickr much easier to update with new photos than my own photoblog. In particular, I still haven't found a good way to automate the updating of the thumbnails that I show at the top of the page, and I have to do it manually. Since I'm posting most of my images to flickr (and then copying some to Wings Open Wide), I decided to use flickr's own script to display the last five images.

Unfortunately, the styled version (which looks much nicer) works vertically, not horizontally, so I couldn't use it in the header to replace my previous thumbnails. This has meant slightly re-ordering the components of the page, and putting the search bar in the right-hand side of the header in place of the thumbnails. I think it looks OK, but I'm open to other suggestions. Polite ones...

What I'd really like is some way to auto-post my flickr images (along with a thumbnail, which is the crucial thing) to my photoblog, with the layout of my choice. Surprisingly, flickr allows you to hotlink to your images, with the very reasonable proviso that you include a link back to the flickr page. They also have an API that lets you get details of the URIs, titles, dimensions, descriptions and so on of the images in your collection in an XML, so it should be possible to build something that grabs this information and then builds a template for you. I'll have to think about it a bit.