I love Feeds!

I just browsed through about 100 new photos from interesting people and groups on Flickr. That took me about 5 minutes. Yes, it certainly says something about the average quality of uploads, but that's not my point. :)

Participating on sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums etc. means interacting with others. I call it "social photography" - it's more than sharing photos with the public. One of the challenges of the social web in general is to keep up with what's happening (a/k/a making you waste way more time on them sites than you originally intended to), and it's especially challenging for the social photo web - because it involves the loading times of photos, the performance of the site, the presentation... social photo activity is not just some text and status updates in your browser.

Now... I limit this article on Flickr and Picasa Web Albums because those are the two services that I use the most. But be honest: neither of the two makes it really easy to follow the activities of interesting people. You get these email notification summaries of new uploads ("xyz has added at least 5 new items..."), you can start browsing the photos of your contacts through a page or section dedicated to their activity... but it's just not very efficient. And efficient is what I want.

Enter Feeds! Wait... what's that? There's a website that answers this question, of course: What Is RSS? And there's a Wikipedia article about it too, of course.

Addition: fellow German Blogger NoodleGei pointed me to the (German version) of a nice video that explains what Feeds do and how to use them. Here's the English version, from Common Crafts: RSS in plain English.

I'll try to explain it with the social photography web in mind:

You get a notification every time when someone adds a new photo to their albums (more about that, especially with Picasa Web Albums, below.) The notification contains a thumbnail of the photo, and a link to the larger image. It's similar to the automated activity messages from Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, but it's not a summary - you get one notification for each new item. Sounds like overload? On the contrary! Because each photo is in a separate notification, you can browse through them really really fast. Like I said above - 100 photos in 5 minutes (I even made comments on some, added some to my favorites, and so on...)

Sounds good? Want to know more? Then read on...


First, you need a dedicated application or web service for reading those Feeds. Check out the What Is RSS website for some recommendations. I for one chose Google Reader - because I'm signed in with my Google account most of the time anyway, and because I can read the Feeds that I subscribed to on my desktop, my netbook, or even my phone that way. It's in the web!

Second, you need to subscribe to the content you want. Like the Flickr photo stream of a person, or the Picasa Web Albums of another person. You normally want to do that from within your browser. Whenever you see the Feed Icon, there's a Feed you can subscribe to:

Where exactly that Feed Icon is located, and how it actually operates and let's you subscribe to a Feed depends a bit on the browser you're using. Please understand that those details are not in the focus of this article. Just one thing: if you're using Google Chrome, you need an extension to see the Feed Icon and get the functionality to subscribe (don't ask me why, it should really be included in the browser.)

Let's talk about the Feeds that Flickr and Picasa Web Albums offer:

On Flickr, you can subscribe to any users entire photo stream (that includes just any photo that is uploaded), to their sets, and to groups (discussions and/or the pool of photos in that group). That pretty much covers everything you'll want. Bonus: the thumbnails in the feed are not cropped to square format and a bit bigger than in their notification summary. Perfect!

Personally, I never subscribe to single sets, I always subscribe to entire photo streams, and group pools.

On Picasa Web Albums, you can subscribe to a persons albums (you'll get a notification when an album is added), and to an album itself (you get a notification when an item is added to an album). Notice something? There's something missing, yes: you can not subscribe to a persons entire activity, like on Flickr. Even when you subscribed to their albums, you won't get a notification when something is added to that album, later. You would have to subscribe to all albums of that user!

That might not be a problem for "album persons" that upload photos to one album and then are done with it - but I'm not really an album person. I update my existing albums all the time, and a lot of the people I'm following have albums that are ongoing collections. You can't follow them with the Feeds that Picasa Web Album offers "out of the box" (ie. the ones you can directly click on the site to subscribe.) Bummer!

However... if you're using a Google Profile, like me :) you have maybe noticed that you can add a "Photos" bar to the profile - and if you choose to hook it up with your Picasa Web Album, it will contain all of your recent uploads, no matter from which album! So there is a way to subscribe to all the activity of a user - they just don't offer a way to subscribe to it directly from the site.

A quick look to the Picasa Web Albums API reference guide reveals a way to subscribe to the entire activity stream.

Fear not! I'll give you the shortcut - this is the Feed URL that you need to add to your Feed reader:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/PASTE-USER-ID-HERE?alt=rss&kind=photo

Instead of PASTE-USER-ID-HERE you put the user ID of the person you want to follow. You can get it from the URL of their Picasa Web Album or Google Profile.

My web album is http://picasaweb.google.com/110486517623939606418 so my user ID is 110486517623939606418. That's all. The Feed URL for all my Picasa Web Albums activity thus is: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/110486517623939606418?alt=rss&kind=photo. Click it to see what happens with your browser. :)

It's a bit bothersome to get there, but for me, it's totally worth it - and that single activity stream has the same bonus as the Flickr feed: the thumbnails are larger, and not cropped to square format in the Feed. You don't need to click through to the site to get an idea of the actual aspect ratio and impression of the photo, you see it right in the stream!

Give it a try and let me know how you like it.