A little Flickr hack

Whilst I'm on a Flickr tip, I thought I'd share with you a little power-user hack I worked out the other day.

You know how in Flickr you can subscribe to an RSS feed of recent comments on your photos? It's a really handy feature, and a neat way of keeping up to speed on what's being said about your pics. Just go to the bottom of your Recent Activity page in Flickr and click on the "Feed" link near the bottom. This will give you the raw XML of your comments feed, with the URL in the address bar. You can use this URL in any feed aggregator. I like Bloglines.

But what if you want to subscribe to the latest comments on someone else's Flickr photostream? Maybe a friend's photostream who you'd like to keep an eye on. There's no feature in Flickr to present a "Recent Activity" page for a user other than yourself, so you can't get at their feed in the same way. There is a way around this though.

Go to your own "Recent Activity" page and use the "feed" link, and copy and paste the URL it gives you into a text editor.

The URL will look something like this:

http://www.flickr.com/recent_comments_feed
.gne?id=12345678@N00&format=rss_200

The bit in bold is Flickr's internal user ID for your account.

We need to replace your user ID with the user ID of the person we want to grab the feed from. In Flickr, navigate to their photo stream or profile. Select the entire URL for this page and copy it.

Next, go to this page in the Flickr API exporer.

Paste the URL in your clipboard into the "Value" field. You can uncheck all of the checkboxes except the "send" one. Then click the "call method" button.

At the bottom of the page a bit of code will appear (if you're using Safari and it doesn't appear, try using another browser). You can ignore most of it except for the line that reads

<user id="87654321@N00">

It's the bit in bold that you need. That's the user ID for the other user. Copy it and paste it into the line you saved in your text editor, replacing your user ID.