Frequently Asked Questions

You may want to. We don't. There are a number of reasons.

1. We want to see the titles of our photos.
2. We like to hear music when we watch a slideshow.
3. We like to create a photoset of normally private photos and then make a slideshowr of them that we can share with other folks without giving them access to all our photos.
4. We like to make slideshows out of tags, groups we are in, etc.
5. We want to choose the resolution of our photos.

If you've done a slideshow that draws from a photoset, then the slideshow should only change when the photoset does. However, if you've done a slideshow based on tags, whenever a new photo gets uploaded with that tag, it will show up in the slideshow. The extreme example of this is if you create a slideshow with no special parameters -- you have a slideshow of the most recent photos uploaded to flickr. This slideshow will probably change completely everytime you reload the page.

If you have "Show captions" turned on, try turning that off (it's off by default). If you are on a slower net connection (e.g., dialup), try using a smaller photo size. Otherwise, how about we agree to blame flickr's responsiveness? Let's just assume it's their system and not ours. However, if you think it is our fault, let us know.

You only need to authenticate yourself if you want to have access to your "private" photos. Slideshowr needs to be given permission to view those photos (although it can't edit them) in order to create the slideshow feed. Flickr created a mechanism to make it easy for you to give slideshowr read-only permissions on your photos.

Do you have cookies turned off? If you click on the link to share us your photos, go to flickr, are asked whether to allow slideshowr to view your photos, end back up on slideshowr, but nothing has changed, then you probably need to your cookies on. If that's not the problem, drop us a line and we'll see if we can help.

At the moment, flickr doesn't support the same searches for photosets and groups as it does for your own photos or all public flickr photos. If they change this, we'll change. Or if there is enough interest, we'll implement this functionality on top of their API.

At the moment, flickr doesn't have consistent support for all its features across all its functions (e.g., you can't search by tag within a photoset). If they change this, we'll change. Or if there is enough interest, we'll implement this functionality on top of their API. And yes, it's arguably a bug that we don't grey out the unsupported functions of photosets when you select a set.

There are three reasons you might not see your photosets:

1. You haven't allowed slideshowr to read your photos (see above).
2. You don't have any photosets. If you haven't set them up in flickr, then we obviously won't have them.
3. There's a bug. Please let us know.

If you see a photo you like during the slideshow and you want to leave a comment for it, just click on the "(flickr photopage)" link.

If the photo you are viewing is marked as "private" on flickr, then we don't draw a link to its photopage. We choose to do it this way because we can't be sure that you'll be able to the photo when you click on the link (You might see the message: "Oops! You don't have permission to view this page.") However, because of the vagaries of the flickr API, if you are viewing a photoset, we have to assume you can see the photos (even if it turns out you can't), so we do draw the links. If you think we should change the behavior, let us know. If you think this was the worst answer ever written in any FAQ ever, our apologies. We agree.

Flickr uses some simple tricks (if you ask it to) to prevent people from downloading your photos. These are trivial to circumvent, so you shouldn't rely on this feature for security. Regardless, slideshowr doesn't have this feature, and for a variety of reasons, is unlikely to implement it in the future. Our apologies if that is a show stopper for you.

Others have reported this issue. We think we know what's going on, but please tell us if this answer doesn't describe your situation. Photos should display the same rotation as they do on flickr if the size of your photo is small, medium, large, square or thumbnail. (However, for some photos, flickr doesn't appear to rotate the square.) For all photos, flickr doesn't rotate the original. However, you may have a slideshowr of just your large photos and see some improperly rotated photos. That's because there isn't always a "large" sized photo on flickr (a photo has to exceed a certain resolution for flickr to create a scaled down "large" version). In that case, we show the original photo, which won't have the rotation that you applied in flickr. Sorry!

Slideshows are regenerated each time you visit the URL (slideshowr requeries flickr to find out what the current photos are that match the criteria for the slideshow, etc.) This means if you make a slideshow for the tag "georgebushsucks", the slideshow will always have photos as long as there are photos on flickr with that tag. If you make a slideshow of one of your photosets, the slideshow will exist as long as the photoset does. If you delete the photoset, slideshowr will have nothing to show. Also, if you decide you want to stop using slideshowr and remove it's access to your photos, you should visit your flickr account settings.

If your browser is Safari (although it doesn't appear to be), it's because we've temporarily disabled music until we sort out some bugs that crash the browser. If it's a different browser, it's possible that you need to upgrade your version of Flash (to at least v9.0), that the slideshow doesn't have musical accompaniment, that your speakers are off or unplugged, or that we have a bug. If it's the last case, please let us know.

We can't stand the default slideshow viewer on flickr (in particular, it's lack of titles), the other solutions didn't support accessing private photos, and it seemed like a fun application to write in Rails. We thought other people would find it useful, so we made it publicly available.

Yes, under the FSF's GPL (v2 for now, v3 as soon as it's finalized). You can find it on rubyforge.

You may be suffering from memory problems or we may have changed something.