Using Flickr Sets In Panelsheets

The online photo sharing site Flickr lets you to create arbitrary “sets” of your images.  Flickr supports RSS feeds for these sets, and SiteGrinder panelsheets (as of SiteGrinder 3.04) can display these sets. Here’s how you do it:

1. Create your Flickr set

Log in to your Flickr account and choose Your sets from the Flickr Organize & Create menu.

In Flickr’s set organizer you can create sets and add images to them from your Photo stream using Flickr’s drag-and-drop tool.  Make sure the images you want to use with SiteGrinder have their permission set so that anyone can view them.  You can do this to all of the images you’ve added to the set at the same time by using the Flickr set editor’s Permissions menu.

Note on the order of Flickr RSS: as of this writing Flickr RSS feeds are in chronological order (newest first) based on when the images were uploaded to your stream.  You may be able to change this date in the Flickr organizer.

2. Set up your panelsheet in Photoshop as described in the previous section.

For Flickr use the [[title]] metadata to display your photo’s names and a -panelsheet layer to show a thumbnail of the photo.  Build your page and open up the panelsheet settings in the Design Manager.

An example layout including a metadata layer with [[title]] and a decorative layer behind the panelthumb is below:

3. Get your set RSS url address

Once you have created a set you can click the Flickr logo to return to your main screen.  Under Flickr’s You menu select Your Sets.

Click the set you want to use with SiteGrinder to enter the set viewing page.  Here you will see a clickable link named Feed.

Right-click on this (or control-click on a Mac) and copy the link location to the clipboard.

4. Set up your panelsheet settings for the RSS feed

Set the Data Type to Feed.

Paste the Flickr RSS into the Feed URL field.

IMPORTANT: The Flickr RSS link contains two “&” symbols.  To use this sort of url in the Design Manager panelsheet settings window you will need to change these to &

You’ll need to make this change after you paste the URL into the panel settings window.  You should not do this in the Content Manager’s feed url editor.

So if the original URL looks like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photoset.gne?
set=72157623884410853&nsid=25976997@N03&lang=en-us

You’ll change it to this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photoset.gne?
set=72157623884410853&nsid=25976997@N03&lang=en-us

If you want the your site visitor to be taken to the Flikr page for an image then set “What to do on click” to “feedlink”.

Click Apply and you will see your images and their names in the panelsheet.