When looking to add photos to your WordPress site there are definitely a very long list of plugins available to get the job done, and provide a number of handy tools like template tags and shortcodes to throw in your posts and pages.

Whether you are looking to search and add content to your posts from flickr, or you are merely trying to post pictures that you have shared and uploaded to flickr on your site.

If you have ever wanted to do that you may have actually come across one of these plugins.

1. Simple Flickr Plugin
2. WordPress Flickr Manager
3. Flickr Tag Cloud Widget
4. Flick Photo Album

But sometimes you may need more functionality, or want to directly get access to more methods and parameters available on the Flickr API. As a result if the decision is to write your own plugin to get this done, you would likely try and find a 3rd party library to help you get this done faster.

The phpFlickr Library

This is where the phpFlickr library comes in handy. It is possible to actually spend the time going through the API and develop your own library, however you would encounter a number of issues that a more established library or established set of tools may not face.

Plugin Name: phpFlickr library

Plugin URL: http://phpflickr.com/

Demo: http://flyr.whatfettle.com/

Docs: Plugin Documentation

Benefits of choosing phpFlickr vs coding from scratch

1. Speed of development when you are not building from the ground up.
2. Better established libraries are well documented and easy to extend.
3. Caching and storage mechanisms may already be in place whereas from scratch you may have to work this in manually.
4. Strong communities and support  – this would allow you to get support from the community about the library.
5. Better tested and stable – Most of the time you will encounter problems that a more established library may already have encountered and handled. As a developer you will have to spend the time researching and testing what could be simple functionality to keep the application glued together, rather than spend the time on building and testing their apps more advanced functionality.
6. Easy to use and lots of code examples to test and get you going.

Summary

Getting hands-on with an API and getting dirty, digging in and seeing what it can do is often the best way to begin your plugin development if you want to extend a 3rd part API. Using APIs is a great way to integrate lots of dynamic content to your site as well as add extra paths to monetize your blog or website, such as with Amazon, iTunes, themeforest, and affliate networks.

If you are looking to get deeper into the Flickr api or just wanting to get a feel for what the API can do the phpFlickr library certainly had a lot of features to make most things you need to do possible. With the addition of handy extra features like the caching, you can make sure you are not taxing your server bandwith, or making unnecessary calls to the API.