Andy Bennett - Digital Creative

I installed the falbum plugin for Wordpress a while back and absolutely loved it! All of my Flickr pics displayed perfectly my blog. Then one day it broke, I got this…

Invalid response from Flickr:

Backtrace:
FAlbum.class.php:1506 - /wp-content/plugins/falbum/FAlbum.class.php
falbum_wp->_error()
FAlbum.class.php:1423 - /wp-content/plugins/falbum/FAlbum.class.php
falbum_wp->_parse_xpath()
FAlbum.class.php:443 - /wp-content/plugins/falbum/FAlbum.class.php
falbum_wp->_call_flickr()
FAlbum.class.php:111 - /wp-content/plugins/falbum/FAlbum.class.php
falbum_wp->show_photo()
album.php:27 - /wp-content/plugins/falbum/wp/album.php
falbum_wp->show_photos()

I looked at the RandomByte site to see if other people had encountered the same problem and they had. It seemed to be a problem with the the amount of memory the Flickr API needed with large photo sets. Someone had suggested increasing the memory in the .htaccess file, I tried to do this but it didn’t work, so I contacted my hosting company and asked if they or I could increase the memory from 8mb to 16mb, they said the couldn’t because of company policy - so I gave up on falbum and looked around for another plugin.

I decided to go for ‘Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress‘ but this plugin also had a problem with it’s API. They said the way to get it to work was to get your own API key, so I followed these instructions and installed the plugin and it all worked fine.

The Photo Album plugin is ok, but I personally prefer the falbum one, so I decided to mess about with the plugin settings in Wordpress - I deactivated the ‘Photo Album for Wordpress plugin’ and activated ‘falbum’. I still got the error message ‘Invalid response from Flickr…’ I then reset the Flickr Authorisation in the falbum options and suddenly it was fixed!

I’m no technical expert, but I think that the API key used by falbum can’t seem to cope with the amount of memory/usage. Falbum now seems to be using my own API key created when I installed the ‘Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress’.

I hope this helps anyone with this problem, I’m not sure if you would need to install the ‘Photo Album for Wordpress plugin’ having got your own API key or whether you can just get an API key without installing the plugin?! If I haven’t explained myself very well and none of this makes sense, just add a comment and I’ll get back to you…
To see my fixed photo gallery in action click here

This post is tagged Technical, Technology