Flickr Tool: BlackMagic – disabled as the new Flickr Changes no longer allow it to function! Sorry-Nosha
Image by nosha
9 March 2010: Read on further below to see how to add any
color background you would like to a blackmagic view… a new
feature. .
B l a c k M a g i c, a new Flickr tool is available.
Blackmagic is very easy to use. Paste:
into your photo description underneath any of the photos in your
photostream.
Adding it in a photo comment on your or other’s photos is also just
fine.
You can replace the " better view " with any text you would like shown
for the link.
Those of you that use more advanced uploading tools can add this to
the text template of each of your photos.
What you get:
From any of your photo pages, an "On Black" style photo view –
view your pictures in medium or large size on black, grey, or white
backgrounds.
From your Flickr home page, you get a Flickr Hive
Mind view of your photo stream. From there, clicking on any photo
gets you the BlackMagic view.
Strengths of BlackMagic
BlackMagic uses something called "referer" information to figure out
the picture you were looking at, so you don’t have to craft a new
link for each picture.
If you want to create custom links you can do so – there’s a
custom link as well as example link text available on every BlackMagic
page (follow the "more" link).
Blackmagic is often faster than other tools that do this type
of display, as it makes only a single, simple call to the Flickr API
to do its work.
Weaknesses of BlackMagic
If you click on a BlackMagic link on a person’s home page, BlackMagic
can’t figure out which of the the photos you were
looking at. However there’s a solution: BlackMagic sends you to a
custom view of all pictures on the user’s home page (via Flickr Hive
Mind ), and then clicking on any of those pictures gives you a
BlackMagic view (as mentioned above).
Super-paranoid web browser settings shut off "referer" information –
BlackMagic can’t figure out which picture you are looking at. You
can still use custom links, which will work on all browsers (as
opposed to 99% of them).
BlackMagic links generally do not work from emails or RSS
feeds. Again, if you are concerned about this working then
creating a custom link works in all cases.
Updates:
New March 2010 feature you can now specify the background color
you want for any or all of your photos. Follow the example link
formats below:
flickrhivemind.net/blackmagic.cgi?bg=blue
flickrhivemind.net/blackmagic.cgi?bg=white
flickrhivemind.net/blackmagic.cgi?bg=333333
(this is web color #333333, a dark gray)
flickrhivemind.net/blackmagic.cgi?bg=ff0000
(this is web color #ff0000, bright red!)
a pasteable example:
To see how these colors are specified, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors
the ‘Hex Triplet’ colors (without the leading #)
and the ‘HTML color names’
should all work…
Michael Brush has sent me another invaluable link for colors. Thanks, Michael!
www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp
www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colorpicker.asp
23 May: A bug that led to your default small/big black/grey settings
not being used has been fixed. Let me know if I’ve broken anything!
23 May: the display has been made even more minimal! Click on "More"
to see other options and links from Blackmagic pages.
22 May: Fiveprime.org was switched to new DNS Servers for what I hope
to be added stability during the day. It seemed the old DNS servers
were flaking out sporadically and were not sufficiently redundant.
6 May 2009: New server for added speed and (eventually) stability.
Added html to paste into your flickr page at the bottom of every Black
Magic page. (only necessary if you want a specific, customized
view)