Here’s a simple tool for generating rss digests out of flickr photos. We call it digestr The idea is that instead of getting an rss item for each photo, groups of photos uploaded over a day or hour are consolidated into a single item.

You can subscribe via rss to a particular user, group, tag, or free-text search and digest by day or hour. Each time the digest finds newly uploaded photos for a given hour or day it will generate a 500×500 pixel image of up to 100 flickr images fit into a grid (the more images, the smaller they are). The 100 image limit is just to keep the server from having to work too hard (this is a cheap hosted account).

The idea came out of trying to make it more useful for friends and family to subscribe to photo’s of my kid Atticus. I only get around to updating my photos of Atticus about once a month, so there may be a backlog of 10 to 50 pictures. The default flickr rss feed show the last 20 uploaded pictures, each as an individual ‘post’. So if you were subscribed you would get a barrage of up to 20 new posts (and nothing beyond the 20 picture limit). The idea behind digestr is that those photos would be consolidated into one easy to view post. Here’s a sample of what one post for the atticus daily digest looks like:

Here’s the RSS feed:

http://uncommonprojects.com/digestr/digestr.php?user=jrookeley&tags=atticus

While the original idea was to use it for digesting a user or group, it’s also pretty interesting to use for tags or text searches like “brooklyn” or “diy“. You can try your own search here.

If you come up with an interesting feed, post the url in the comments. Also, the image grid generator (we call it gridr) might be useful for something else, so let us know if you have any thoughts. If you want to poke around in the source code, here it is (it’s not heavily commented, so good luck).

Update:

I’ve been using the digestr for a while now. Here are some of the more interesting images:

From the bad signage photo pool:

This one is from the feed for anything tagged Jackson Heights (the neighboorhood I live in). It shows a military funeral for a soldier who lived in Jackson Heights and was killed in Iraq. I walk by this church everyday, but probably wouldn’t have known about the funeral otherwise.

From anything tagged “DIY“:

One hour’s digest of anything tagged Brooklyn :