How to Add a Flickr Widget in WordPress

Flickr is one of the good old reliable photosharing sites. It has its very own social features and a thriving community of loyal users. Showcasing your flickr photos on your WordPress website is extremely easy. Since flickr supports oEmbed format, you can simply copy and paste a flickr photo URL in a WordPress post, and WordPress will automatically display the photo on that page. Recently one of ours asked us how do you add a showcase of your recent flickr photos in a WordPress sidebar widget? In this article we will show you how to add a flickr widget in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Quick Flickr Widget. Once activated, go to Appearance » Widgets section in your WordPress admin. There you will see a new widget called Quick Flickr Widget. Drag and Drop the Quick Flickr Widget to one of the sidebars also known as widget areas. In the widget configuration, simply add your Widget title, your flickr username, the count of images you want to show, and a flickr tag if any specific ones you want to pull from.

Once you hit save, you will see your flickr photos being displayed in the sidebar.

If you notice in the screenshot above, we have two different displays. The one to the left is how the default widget would look like. The default display is built to show one wide image thumbnail per line. If you want to show more than one flickr image per line in a grid format like we have done in the right screenshot, then you would need to add a custom CSS class in your theme’s style.css file.

.quick-flickr-item {
width: 150px;
float: left;
margin: 0 20px 20px 0;
}

You would probably need to adjust the width and margin above to match your theme’s layout. For example, if you have a smaller sidebar, then you would make the width smaller, and adjust the margins until it looks right. It will take a little bit of trial and error.

There are several other plugins that will allow you to add flickr widgets in WordPress sidebar and widget areas. We chose Quick Flickr Widget because it is created by a well-reputed author, and has fairly good ratings. It is also very light-weight and well-coded, so it will NOT slow down your site. Last but certainly not the least, it is very easy to setup.

There are other more advanced flickr plugins such as Slickr Flickr which adds ton of extra functionality that you may or may not need. For example: display flickr photos as a gallery, or a slideshow. It also adds lightbox display for flickr photos with captions, and much more. However it is not as easy to setup as Quick Flickr Widget, and it will have a slight impact on your site’s performance.

We hope that this article helped you quickly add a flickr widget in WordPress sidebar and widget areas. Are you using a plugin to display flickr widget in WordPress? Which one is it? Let us know by leaving a comment below.