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Tweet this Flickr photo – using the new Flic.kr URL shortening service



Flickr have started their own URL shortening service, specific to their own domain.

The service uses the http://flic.kr domain name. So far I have noticed that individual photo pages each have a short URL that look like so http://flic.kr/p/EKD8 at present you can find the short url for a photo by viewing the source code of the page it is on. it will looks something like this <link rev=”canonical” type=”text/html” href=”http://flic.kr/p/EKD8″ > its quite near the top of the page.

I wrote a quick bookmarklet, tested on Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer that lets you quickly send the shortened version of the photos URL to the twitter messaging service.

Tweet This Flickr Photo (bookmarklet)

To install, simply click and drag the above link to your bookmarks bar, or else you can right click on the link and select ‘Bookmark This Link‘ or “Add to Favourites” depending on which browser you are using. After that if you see a photo on Flickr that you would like to tweet about, you can just click the bookmarklet and the shortened URL will be sent to your Twitter status box ready for you to add a comment to go with it.

You can also shorten  Flickr user’s photostream URLs too, this is more straightforward, you just put http://flic.kr/ + the URL alias (the bit that normally comes after /photos/ in the Flickr photostream URL)  so for example, the shortcut for my photostream would be http://flic.kr/steeev

If you want to use the shortened photo URL with another service, you can use this alternative bookmarklet, which copies the shortened URL into the search box at the top right hand of the flickr page, which you can then copy and paste into the messaging service of your choice.

Short Flickr URL (bookmarklet)

Im sure the Flickr devs will be adding methods to access the short URLs via the website and also the API at some point. Until then, i think this is a useful stop gap solution.

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  3. Facebook style user tagging for Flickr
  4. Flickr Greasemonkey Scripts Update – Flickr PM + Multi Group Sender
  5. Updated Greasemonkey Script – Flickr Groups Organiser

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 9:23 AM and is filed under bookmarklets, firefox, flickr, google chrome, programming, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Tweet this Flickr photo – using the new Flic.kr URL shortening service”

  1. You can generate a short URL for a photo just from its ID; here’s the recipe. (Watch out for the fact Flickr IDs are now over 31 bits long in binary, so you might need to use support for large integers).

    On the subject of short URLs for users, you might want to check out the discussion on the Flickr Ideas group, where it’s noted that those URLs aren’t advertised and are (possibly) subject to change.

    Thanks for the bookmarklets, though; they’ll be useful for people, I’m sure.

  2. Steev, is this URL shortening officially provided by Flickr, or it’s just someone who registered the flic.kr domain and is redirecting?

  3. Thanks for the info paul
    ChL the flic.kr domain is owned by Flickr.