Website Support Clinic update – Flickr Galleries
A key topic from last week’s Website Support Clinic was Flickr galleries and using the FlickrIt application to insert image galleries into EdWeb.
As yet EdWeb does not have a native image gallery application. However, we have some great guidance on inserting Flickr galleries onto your site. Using Flickr is an easy way of showcasing a gallery of images in a polished format.
The Process
Once you have a Flickr account for your site you can create and manage a number of galleries.
Using the Flickr Album ID, the web application FlickrIt allows you to generate a code which can be used to create an asset in EdWeb. This means you will be able to easily insert the gallery onto a web page.
However, there are some additional steps that need to be taken in order to ensure that the gallery is responsive and complies with web accessibility guidelines. Although the gallery might look great on a desktop computer it would not be easily viewable to someone on a mobile device.
At the clinic we identified a way to simplify this process.
Our Guidance
To make things easier we have taken the code from FlickrIt and created a step by step guide on how to customise this for your own use.
Now you only need two bits of information:
- the number of images in your gallery
- the Flickr album ID
The Flickr album ID is simply a string of numbers and how to find it is detailed in our guide.
Once you have the code ready, you can create your asset and the gallery will become available in the Asset Store. Should you wish to add images to your Flickr gallery in the future you simply need to go into the Asset Store and edit the asset. From here you can amend the HTML to reflect your new image count.
Things to Note
Using Flickr galleries in EdWeb involves creating HTML which can be made into an asset in the asset store. This type of asset is what is known as a custom HTML asset.
As this involves working with code, the ability to create custom HTML assets is limited to those with the ‘Tech user’ role in EdWeb. This role is reserved for technical staff and is given only after a discussion between the lead publishers and the University Website Programme.
Further information is available on our wiki.
If you would like to book a space at the Website Support Clinic (Tuesdays, 12-3pm) to discuss your website’s homepage or any other EdWeb/Polopoly related topic, please send an email to website.support@ed.ac.uk.
