Poking around with Photocasting

I've been playing around with the new photocasting feature of iPhoto '06 recently. Sadly, no one in my family has a copy of iLife '06, so I'm unable to take part of the fun. Not wanting to be left out, I've grabbed the RSS feeds of some of my Flickr contacts to add to iPhoto. It worked...kind of.

For some reason, the Flickr feeds only display a user's ten most recent photos. Dave Chartier and I were messing around with this the other night, deep in the hermetically sealed TUAW offices, and we confirmed this suspicion when he updated his own Flickr pool (to which I had subscribed. Scary thought). You can try it out by subscribing to our "Rigs of the Day" Flickr feed [link].

Subscribing to our TUAW news feed [link] pulls the twenty most recent photos from our posts, which is kind of weird because it leaves you with a bunch of out-of-context images.

When publishing a photocast, your outgoing images end up in web/sites/iPhoto/ on your iDisk, and the images from subscribed photocasts land in home/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Data on your Mac (I'm glad to see that iPhoto's method of arranging its library is no longer a labyrinth of nested folders).

It's definitely a cool thing, and if I were using it for its intended purpose (the grandparents in Florida) I'd probably love it. Are you publishing/subscribing to any 'casts?

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Source: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/features/photocasting.html

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I've been playing around with the new photocasting feature of iPhoto '06 recently. Sadly, no one in my family has a copy of iLife '06, so...

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Jason

Hi,

I just put up a simple web app at photocastr.com that allows you to
authenticate your flickr account to it (read-only, naturally) and create
photocasts.

It's still quite alpha, but you can do basic tags and I pass through the
tags to iPhoto (as keywords). I use http://phlikr.3xi.org/'s technique
of adding the keyword Photocast to each photo. So if you create that
keyword in iPhoto, you will be able to make a smart album of your
photocast photos which will allow you to sync it to your iPod.

Enjoy!

February 02 2006 at 12:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

andy

Um.... maybe it's because the flickr feed itself only shows the ten latest entries?

January 24 2006 at 5:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

N Turpin

I like the idea of Photocasts & have always loved the flickr RSS. Photocasts being a much more mum friendly way of doing things.

Immediate disappointment with iPhoto was you can't photocast Smart Folders. I can't have a photocast that showed all the photos that I had tagged with the keyword nights out, or gigs.

January 24 2006 at 12:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris Koerner

We just recently had our first child, and as such wanted to share our photo's with family and friends. So I setup a photocast of our baby photo's, and now as we take more picutres I simply update the album, and viola! Much better than sending out new emails every few days saying, "We've got more photos!"
Oh, and since I'm a proud father here's a link!:

http://photocast.mac.com/ckoerner/iPhoto/kari-grace/index.rss

January 24 2006 at 11:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ryan

I blogged about the same thing (click my name to see). My solution was BubbleShare.com. It has a great iPhoto plugin similar to Flickr, it also has a web based multi image uploader. It limits feeds to 100 images but you can do unlimited feeds. The images are full res. So while Flickr is more popular, BubbleShare is much better for photocasting.

January 24 2006 at 11:20 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

OK, so maybe I am a bit biased, but Smugmug also provides RSS feeds of sites, galleries, categories, etc. Super easy to add to iPhoto as a photocast:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=234497#post234497

January 24 2006 at 10:58 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Christian Gehrke

I have been using the flickr RSS feeds in a few flash apps thanks to Todd Dominey's SlideShowPro (http://www.slideshowpro.net/) and love that fact that I can build a flash app and have the images pulled automatically from flickr via the RSS feed.

The idea of having an RSS feed from a .mac account that is not limited to the 10 latest photos is very intriguing and i would love to test it out.

I have figured out how to tweak Flickr and create my own group to post photos and then use the RSS of that group to help control the galleries but what a pain.

Here are some links to the flash apps I have created that acutally pull photos from the flickr RSS feed.

http://123adapt.com/flickr/

http://123adapt.com/underwater/

http://123adapt.com/nudes/ (this one is NSFW)