Just discovered a feature of flickr I didn’t know about – short URLs. Every Flickr photo page has it’s own embedded short URL. Much smarter to use the built in tool than using bit.ly or tinyurl etc. Well, it would be if you knew it was there!
There is some documentation about the short URL service in the ‘App Garden’: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html but it doesn’t provide you with any simple tool for working out your photo’s URL. There are ways though!
It’s in the source, for a start. Look for it in the head of your page:
<link rev=”canonical” type=”text/html” href=”http://flic.kr/p/7hKFww” >
The Operator Firefox extension exposes the URL as a Resource, which is how I found it. Frustratingly, you can only look at it – it doesn’t do anything.
There is a greasemonkey script; a tool called flick.to.twit which integrates it with a tweet; and a Firefox extension, which I haven’t tried yet, in this thread, which might be worth watching.
Nice anyway – surprised they (flickr) haven’t done more with this.