Many of us use the amazing Flickr gallery module on our Squidoo lenses. Unfortunately, this is the end of it. Today, HQ announced that they are going to retire it.
There is no easy way to replace these galleries, but there is a way. By using this tool here: Item Box Builder
It requieres many steps and may not be worth it on some lenses. It’s all up to you. Since Flickr seems to randomly block images displayed on squidoo you will need to uplaod the image on your own image hosting. Here’s what to do:
First choose one Flickr image you want to use (or any other).
Right click the image and save it. upload to your image hosting.
Grab the image link and head back to squidtool
Go to the item list and click to have it open and add your link to the image field (click the little arrow to make sure the image looks ok). Then fill the other 2 fields.
Once you have set all your images, you can play with the other fields to change the look of your gallery (colors, font sizes etc).
Preview and grab the HTML. Paste into a text module and voila.
Here’s a quick one I did with some zazzle posters: The World’s Deadliest Animals (it takes you to the right module).
Now it’s much bigger than the gallery module, so those clickouts might be lower. You can make up to 3 in a row. Choose wisely.
Load speed might suffer too, not sure yet. I would limit to 6 or 9 items. Anyway 6 items counts for a little over half of the allotted characters in a text module anyway.
ADDENDUM (Saturday June 16): If you don’t mind a lot of coding, please read how to do a thumbnail gallery on Greekgeek blog here: Squidoo’s Flickr Module Is Retiring: How to Recover.
I hadn’t seen this tool before. Looks like this isn’t too hard, and if you host images yourself that makes it easier.
Of course using the Text Module you are limited in the number of characters, and therefore the number of images, but it could be a good replacememt.
Tony, I really wish someone will find an easier way to add a Flickr gallery to our squidoo lenses: this method is slow (but better than nothing) and not everyone has hosting for their images.
I’m wondering about pinning a photo to Pinterest, then using the embed feature, reset the size to reduce it to a thumbnail. Putting that on Squidoo will lead the viewer to the original website.
Amazing job, comimg up with something so quickly. thank you for your work. If the images are not our own, how to we deal with the attribution issue? Any thoughts on that yet?
I experimented with your suggestion above and got it to work just fine using Creative Commons images from Flickr!
It is a bit of work but at least I can have clickable links on the images. I used tinypic.com for image hosting (you don’t have to have an account) and was able to choose a smaller image size. I went with the size just larger than thumbnail and may experiment with using thumbnail sizes next.
Here is a link if you want to have a look at the module – http://www.squidoo.com/christmasgiftskidscancreate#module159766154 .
Thanks so much for this awesome tip!
I was here yesterday after Virginia shared your link.
If you think about it, I would love for you to link up any blog posts you do pretaining to squidoo in my weekly squidoo link up on my blog. You can post any day of the week, not just Thursdays. The linky stays active to add to until the following Thursday each week.