Frequently Asked Questions

In iPhoto, under Preferences->Keywords->+, add the keyword Photocast. Then make a smart album (File->New Smart Album...) and specify the conditions ("Keyword" "is" "Photocast"). Obviously, you can add other constraints if you only want a portion of your photocast to show up in the smart album. Now iPhoto will allow you to sync that album to your iPod. At the moment, you have to do this bit of a kludge because iLife does not have direct support for puttings photocasts onto the iPod.)

There are two possibilities:

1. Your search is not returning any results. Please try the "Preview" button. You should see thumbnails of that match your search terms.
2. There is a bug in photocastr. If you can see the results on photocastr.com but they are not showing up in iPhoto, please send us an email with your search terms so we can fix it. Sorry about that!

Photocastr.com automatically includes all the tags on a photo as keywords in the photocast feed. However, iPhoto will ignore keywords that it doesn't already know about. So, if you have a tag in flickr, "ihategeorgewbush", you need to add a keyword in iPhoto (Preferences->Keywords->+) called "ihategeorgewbush" After that, iPhoto will Do The Right Thing. If you want to do a lot of tagging in iPhoto, make sure you check out Keyword Assistant.

Perhaps you don't. If you only want access to the ten most recent, low-resolution versions of a flickr feed, then you definitely don't need this. Flickr does that now with its rss feeds.

We are using it to make it easy to get photos onto our iPods, allow flickr to be the main storage point for our photos (e.g., if you have two or more people who want access to the same photos, you just upload everything to flickr and have everyone subscribe to the appropriate feed. Anyone in your group can then edit the photos in iPhoto, upload the changes to flickr, and know that everyone else will see the changes. You can do this informally (by all sharing a flickr id) or formally, by using flickr groups.)

You only need to authenticate yourself if you want to have access to your "private" photos. Photocastr needs to be given permission to view those photos (although it can't edit them) in order to create the photocast feed. Flickr created a mechanism to make it easy for you to give photocastr read-only permissions on your photos.

At the moment, flickr doesn't support the same searches for photosets and groups as it does for your own photos or all public flickr photos. If they change this, we'll change. Or if there is enough interest, we'll implement this functionality on top of their API.

At the moment, flickr doesn't have consistent support for all its features across all its functions (e.g., you can't search by tag within a photoset). If they change this, we'll change. Or if there is enough interest, we'll implement this functionality on top of their API. And yes, it's arguably a bug that we don't grey out the unsupported functions of photosets when you select a set.

There are three reasons you might not see your photosets:

1. You haven't allowed photocastr to read your photos (see above).
2. You don't have any photosets. If you haven't set them up in flickr, then we obviously won't have them.
3. There's a bug. Please let us know.

We needed this capability (it's easier than using Adobe's Bridge), the other solutions didn't support accessing private photos, and it seemed like a fun application to write in Rails. We thought other people would find it useful, so we made it publicly available.

We know of two similar services, phlikr and Flickr2Photocast. (In fact, we got the idea for the keyword "Photocast" from phlikr) As of this writing, neither supports authentication.

Yes, under the FSF's GPL (v2 for now, v3 as soon as it's finalized). You can find it on rubyforge.

You may be suffering from memory problems or we may have changed something.