This post is not going to make sense to anyone who doesn’t both have a blog and post photos to Flickr.

Several dozen (or hundred, or thousand, or hundred-thousand) people on Flickr are either really ticked off at me, or they know that I’ve been revealed as a completely clueless user of the WordPress plugin, Photo Album. Or both

I didn’t configure it right, and through a series of accidents and misunderstandings, people started complaining yesterday in at least two well-traveled and high traffic forums connected to a couple of large photo groups on Flickr. People were yelling for my head and demanding that my entire domain be taken down by complaining to my ISP.

I reported this to my home ISP’s head-chief-uber sysadmin, who laughed and as good as called me a WordPress n00b.

That’s husbands for you.

Still, it’s nice having a geek around the house to make the computers “go.” Actually, he was very sympathetic and was ready to do something technical if we could figure out what the problem was on our end.

I set about making things right with the various forum people on Flickr, and reported the problem to the Photo Album discussion group. I hope that’ll be good enough to keep me from getting TOSed.

It’s completely true that I didn’t set up the “link back” setting on Photo Album correctly. You’re supposed to link every photo back to Flickr that you pull into your blog via the API key that I set up through the plugin. The API dingus was how I was showing all of my Flickr photos on my former photos page here. There were links back to Flickr from each page, but the URLs for each photo were going through my blog URL. Which is an option if you want to keep viewers on your own site, but some Flickr users objected,
didn’t see the links, or thought I was trying to steal their images.

The other really, really bad thing that was happening was that the plugin also pulls in ALL of the images from the feeds of ALL of your public groups. You can “hide” them so they don’t show up on the page, but they’re still in your feed. And “hiding” isn’t as easy as it looks, as setting the configuration is tricky, and it’s easy to mess up because there are two separate “save” buttons, one for general configuration, and another separate one for “hiding” sets and groups.

A couple of my fellow Flickrites didn’t seem to realize that their photos had not been downloaded from Flickr and physically uploaded and posted here – others saw that it was a just a feed (albeit a poorly configured one) and tried to explain it. However, the damage was done; I looked like a thief to some people.

In the end, I completely deactivated the plugin, because even after “hiding” the groups, they were still visible via the long links that had already been posted to the Flickr forums. One of them was a live screenshot of my photo page, showing the group in question. It really looked like I was evil and bad and stealing images, so I can’t blame them for becoming upset. I went back and checked, and all the links that formerly lead to my photo page of their groups are now dead.

The only way to deactivate those links was to deactivate the plugin. So now it’s gone, and I hand-coded a few of my photos onto the page instead. I’d like to figure out how to show just that one set without having to hand-code the page, so some cautious tinkering may happen later in the week.

It’s over, but for a few hours there, it was horrifying.

And the really horrifying thing is that I’ve been using this plugin since…September. And of course I have the same setup for the old Holy Innocents blog, although that is probably going to get deactivated soon, too. Merde.

On the other other hand, yesterday someone contacted me out of the blue and said they wanted to inquire about the rights to use this very ordinary photo I took a few years ago of the Illinois River for a school textbook. I checked around as much as possible online to see if either she was on the up-and-up, or if anyone had complained about being spammed in a similar way. I sent some very minimal contact information (P.O. Box: I may be dumb but I’m not stupid) and will await developments. If they use the image,
I’ll be compensated a small amount of money – a few hundred dollars. I highly doubt the publisher will pick my photo to use for their chapter on whatever it is; I’m sure they have a lot of high-quality images to choose from. But still, if it’s for real, what a hoot.