Blog: Displaying Events

Module Lets You Upload Photos to Your Site and Flickr at the Same Time

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could upload as many images as you’d like to your site without worrying about your bandwidth? Or even better, if you could automatically share the images you upload to your site with an image sharing service like Flickr, and then have these photos displayed on your website but hosted on Flickr? 

That’s exactly what we did last week for the Stand Up Speak Out campaign. Using Drupal and the Flickr API, I created a small Drupal module called Flickrup that does this – all you have to do is enable it and configure it. It helped us easily display photos from many of the thousands of events that took place around the world on their individual event webpages. Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s what the module can do:

• Upload images to your Flickr account and link them to specific content
• Automatically display images along with your website content
• Define a global tag for all your uploaded images
• Define tags per content types, which lets you automatically tag images using node parameters and location data if its available (for example, you can tag all images with 'yoursitename' event[nid] country)
• Add additional custom tags for each upload

Here’s how it works:

• Uses phpFlickr for Flickr integration and automatic uploading 
• Uploads images first to your server and then to Flickr, and gives you the option of removing local files after they've been sent to Flickr
• Automatically tags your pictures for your specific content on your website, which allows appropriate images to be retrieved and displayed on the appropriate pages (this is optional)

And it works! Thousands of photographs were uploaded last week during the Stand Up Speak Out campaign.

Below I’ll walk you through using the Flickrup module step by step.