Find Your Flickr RSS Photostream

 

You may have noticed that when you view someone’s Flickr Photo Stream that the link to the RSS feed for that user no longer appears, as you can see in the screen capture below.

It turns out that RSS and Atom feeds are still present and available, but you have to do a little sleuthing to find them. To find the Flickr RSS or Atom feed for that user’s page, access the View Source function in your browser. (In Internet Explorer, right click, then select View Source). Then, search for RSS or XML. You may have to use Find Next if the string found is not what you need; the result you want looks like this:

As you can see, both RSS and Atom are indeed present in the source for the page.

 

For the RSS feed, use the content that looks like href=/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=39027292@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200and and convert to http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=39027292@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200 and test in your browser. You should now see the feed as shown in the sample below:

Now that you’ve found the RSS or Atom feed, there are many things you can do with it. If you are a developer, you can use the feed to pull in photos via RSS for an app. Using MS Project Siena, you can easily pull in the feed using REST, as shown in this example:

 

Of course, there is no guarantee that Yahoo! will continue to offer these feeds, but since there are so many apps out there developed over the years that use them, it is unlikely that this functionality can be pulled without disrupting the community.