The primary motivation to make this script was frustration over a Flickr design so unilaterally focused on peoples latest uploads, that it's almost difficult to explore older photos, and frustration because Flickr hasn't updated "older" photos to the 1600px and 2048px wide browsing sizes, making it less interesting to browse the photos on larger desktop monitors when you actually stumble upon them. With this script I try to make it easier and more inviting to explore photos on Flickr, and when you find those photos only available in browsing sizes up to 1024px, they are up-scaled to fill the space in the browser-window - and if made available by the photographer, in the background smoothly replaced with the full-size original for best possible sharpness and display-quality...
Current features:
- Show photographer's albums on photostream-pages
Stig's Flickr Fixr adds a right column on photostream pages, teasing the 10 first albums from the photographer. Unless photographer has re-ordered the albums in Organizer, the 10 first albums are the latest 10 albums created by the photographer. - (*)Increase display-size and quality of "old" photos
Flickr photos uploaded before March 2012 are only available for browsing in versions up to 1024 pixels wide or high, and on photopages or photopages in lightbox-mode the photos are normally not upscaled even if browser-window is much larger. With Stig's Flickr Fixr the photos are first up-scaled to fill available space in the browser-window. Secondly the script looks for availability of original uploaded version of photo and if found it replaces the 1024px version with the original. Note, many photographers doesn't make their originals available, but when they do, this can significantly improve the photo display quality on for example 24+ inch desktop monitors. - Photographer's other photos by tag-links
On Flickr, tag-links on photos currently leads you to a page where you can explore your own photos with this tag, photos from people you follow with this tag and a global search for photos with this tag. But the (second?) most obvious, photos from the same photographer with this tag is not an option. Stig's Flickr Fixr adds this option by adding a link directly on the tag (when hovering it with mouse) pointing to all current photographers photos with this tag. - Links to album-map and album-comments
Nov. 2015, new feature! On album pages, two links are added to the "album header". One link pointing to a map with current album's photos, and another link pointing to an old hidden/forgotten (and deprecated) page with album comments. In an earlier version of Flickr album-comments was an official feature. It ain't official anymore, but the old comments page still exists and is also a good page for reading or editing long album-descriptions. Of course, if you add new album-comments, changes are nobody ever sees them. - Display photo-notes
Dec. 2015, new feature! Basic support for displaying the good old photo-notes on Photopages! This early version of the feature has some limitations: Only works on public and "safe" photos, not working in "Lightbox mode", and editing or creation of new notes are not supported. I hope to improve the feature in a future version, but some of the mentioned limitations are not trivial to fix. - A fix to actually show a geotagged photo on the linked map
Currently when a photo is geotagged on Flickr you can follow a link to a map showing the location where the photo was shot. However this map does normally only show latest or most "interesting" photos in the area. Usually the photo you was looking at is not included on map or in the image-strip below the map. Stig's Flickr Fixr adds the photo you came from to the image-strip below the map, and "opens" it. Well, it's a 90% fix: To see exactly where it was taken, click twice on this photo in the image-strip to close and re-open it; Now a star shows on the map pointing to the exact position of the photo.
(*) A few additional notes regarding the up-scaling feature:
- Currently the script only do up-scaling and potentially replacement on plain Photopages and on Photopages in "Lightbox mode". It does not touch the "Slideshow mode". But Flickr already do up-scaling in slideshows. In a future version of the script I might try to add the possibility to also replace with the original in slideshows.
- Original photo files can be pretty big (megabytes). If you are on a slow connection or especially if you have an internet connection where you pay for the amount of traffic you use, you might not want this script installed right now. In a future version of the script I might make it possible to turn off unwanted features individually.
- It's probably mostly desktop users with a monitor in the 20+ish inch sizes that really sees a big differences here. Some laptops produced today - even smaller ones - have very high resolution displays, but the OS is usually set up to up-scale content in such cases, effectively making the resolution much lower (For example a 13 inch Asus ZenBook UX305 with 3200x1800 display is in Win10 default configured to scale content 225%, effectively making it a 1422x800 resolution display).
- Flickr's zoom-feature does not work as expected on a photopage when the script has up-scaled/replaced the photo. I might try to fix that in later version of the script.
If it doesn't work...
Testing has only been done on my own PCs, and I'm eager to find out if it "scales" well to other users' setup. So feedback are very welcome. Also if it just simply works! :-) But if it doesn't work, here's a few things you might investigate or try before giving feedback:
- If you have other userscripts installed which could affect Flickr, try disabling these.
- If above helps, try re-ordering your userscripts to make Stig's Flickr Fixr run first (if your userscript extension allows this)... Then try re-enabling the other userscripts.
- A few places Stig's Flickr Fixr depends on some inserted "timer-delays" before doing stuff. This is not very elegant, and I will try to implement it in a more robust way in the future. If it is possible for you to try a similar browser-setup on a faster PC, it could be interesting to know if this makes a difference.
If you can solve your problem by disabling or reordering userscripts, please inform me of the problem, the userscripts involved and how you re-ordered or disabled them to make things work again. Also if you have problems and suspects timing ("timer-delays") might be an issue, please let me know what happens - or doesn't happen.
Generally the performance of this script - especially the up-scaling and replace with original part - depends on factors like how fast your PC/browser is, how big the original file is, how fast your internet connection is, and if Flickr's servers maybe are having a bad day (being slow or unresponsive). I find it usually works very fast on my setup, but it varies.
