Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Brittany Photo Gallery - courtesy of Flickr and PictoBrowser

Right from the original concepts for our holiday home website I'd planned to include a Photo Gallery of interesting pictures, of the Gite itself, of things to do and see in and around the surrounding Brittany area, and of local attractions.

With the eventual rush to finish and launch the site this was something that had unfortunately been dropped off and although I've still had in mind to build the album, it's never quite happened.

And then of course there's Flickr.

We've had a Flickr account for our holiday home for some time now but have mainly used it for hosting Blog photos as Blogger doesn't allow you to show Blogger hosted pictures on any other site (and as we distribute the RSS feed of new articles via Feedburner then none of the pictures appear if I host them on Blogger).

Earlier in the month Craig McGinty on This French Life suggested a great solution with PictoBrowser, a free flash-based application that gives you simple easy to use photo gallery of selected Flickr photos.

Along the bottom is a ribbon bar of photo thumbnails; you can scroll along them, pick and view any you want by clicking the thumbnail, and jump to the selected picture on Flickr by clicking "Photo Link".

Unfortunately we are unable to display our Brittany photo gallery in your browser as you do not appear to have the free Adobe Flash player installed.<br>Visit the <a href=http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer target=_blank>Adobe Flash download centre</a> to get the latest version.

Setting up PictoBrowser is simplicity itself. Firstly you need to setup a free Flickr account and upload your own photographs with a short description and any appropriate tags such as Brittany, Josselin, Fishing, etc.

Once you've uploaded your own pictures PictoBrowser can then be used to create your own gallery - click on the 'Info' button in the bottom right hand corner, enter your Flickr username, select which photos you want to display (choosing subsets by tag or photostream - so you could display all pictures tagged with "holiday" say), and you'll then be presented with a short piece of HTML code that you paste into your website.

And that's all there is to it. The photo gallery is dynamically created based on your current Flickr photos so if you upload new pictures they're automatically shown without you having to make any website changes.

I've been uploading some more of the hundreds of photos I'd already taken to Flickr, have tagged the subset I want to show with a new 'PictoBrowser' tag, and then written a new Brittany photo gallery web page to show off my selected pictures.

There's more detailed step by step instructions on how to create your own viewer on PictoBrowser's Flickr home page but it really is very simple to use - if you've your own blog or website then I strong recommend giving it a try.

Update July 08: Rewrote the HTML automatically generated by PictoBrowser to make it W3C standards compliant HTML

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