Are you not exactly thrilled with the new Flickr layout for the photostream page? Would you like the option to go back to the old presentation with say enabling or disable an feature? Are you using Firefox as your browser (or one of your browsers)? If yes, then please read on. If no, well, thanks but the rest of this blog might not interest you.
You can get Flickr to use the old layout for the photostream by adding "?details=1" to the end of a photostream URL. Thus:
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/ uses the new Flickr layout, while
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/?details=1 uses the old style.
Unless you're always wanting to manually add the "?details=1" to the end of the URL, you need an automatic method to append the detail level parameter to the URL. While I'm sure other browsers have their own methods, I'm a Firefox user and thus can say how I got it to work.
There is a Firefox add-on called "redirect," which will convert an URL based upon rules you set up to a different URL and then direct you to this new URL. Not so surprisingly the name of the add-on is Redirector. The Redirector homepage contains additional information and even shares the source code with you.
Simply installing Redirector is not enough to get to the old style of Flickr photostream. You also need to configure the redirector to identify the Flickr photostream URL and to update it as necessary for the correct layout.
Once you bring up the Redirector Add-on Options page, you need to enter the required configuration information. What I'm using and please note your mileage may vary is:
- Description: Flickr Photostream
- Example URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/
- Include Pattern: ^(http\://www\.flickr\.com/photos/[-_a-zA-Z0-9@]+(/?$|/with/[0-9]+/?$))
- Exclude Pattern: http\://www\.flickr\.com/photos/organize/?
- Redirect To: $1?details=1
- Pattern Type: Regular Expression Wildcard (Set the Regular Expression radio button.)
- Unescape matches: Do not check the box
- Escape matches: Do not check the box
- Enabled: Check this box
Pressing the test button will allow you to test your work. You should see a message box appear with information about the details you provided and the results being able to successfully redirect the URL to the new one. You're not yet done, as you still need to save your work by pressing the save button.
There you have it and I hope it helps you out!!