Flickr-ize Image Search Plugin

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Features

This post lists in detail why this plugin is needed for almost anyone who wants to easily search images in their own blog or at Flickr.

Briefly, this plugin makes the life of bloggers easier for searching the images. It does so by providing a way for them

1. to search their own database by inserting a tab ‘Image Search’ next to brows all tabs for images. This feature allows the blogger to search images in their own databases. This is especially helpful for multi author blogs, where many authors don’t know if other authors have uploaded same or similar images previously. The authors may search existing database and use the already uploaded images.
2. search flickr for images and use in their blog if appropriate. The plugin allows to extract the most interesting images and these can be sent to the editor directly just the way regular images can be sent.

Screen Shots

Imagine you have 400 images uploaded in your wordpress blog, and like me you are trying to find the “Download Now” that happens to be green. So that I could use that image as a download button. The image was uploaded months ago, so your browse all tab currently gives you no clue where the image is .. it looks something like the following.

You can clearly imagine how difficult it could be to wade through these pages and find an image that you already uploaded a while back. However if you use this Image Search Plugin, you can search the image by specific keywords as shown in the following:

The Flickr Image Search feature is the sugar I like the most about this plugin. Right from your admin area, you can not only search an image based on its Flickr Tags, you can just include the image using your usual Send to Editor button. No more copying and pasting the urls. Best of all it finds your the most interesting images, allows you to use any size of the image you like. Give it a try and I am sure you are going to love this feature.

Requirements

Your system must either support cURL or allow_fopen_url for flickr search feature to work. The Image Search of your local database should work independenty whether Flickr feature works or not. If your server does not support both of these, you will be informed in search results. Chanes are that you may not know whether your system supports these two features, yet, so try the plugin and see for yourself.

I intend to work to remove this restriction at least for IE in future, so stay tuned.

Installation

Just unzip the file and upload the whole directory ‘FlickrizeImageSearch’ to your plugins directory. There is no special configuration. If you face any issue, dont hesitate to contact me.

Upcoming Features

Here are a few features that I wish to include in the final version.

1. Flickr Image Info : This will allow the blogger to view info of the flickr image.
2. More Pages : Currently I am showing only the first 6 images of flickr search. I intend to add more images in next pages.
3. Pagination Options: Bloggers will be able to set how many images they want to see per page in the search result.

History

Beta Release 0.2 Aug 18 2007. FlickrizeImageSearch.zip

License

Flickr-ize Image Search is released under the license provided here.

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