some Flickr images do not display in lightbox

Without a URL I cannot say for sure, but my guess would be that the specific size you are trying to show doesn’t exist in Flickr for that image.

The site in question is: https://danielwolf.photography/

See photo 10 for example (red dress). It’s the first one that does not work in the lightbox view. Down below a few more have the same problem.

The link the lightbox is trying to open is: https://farm9.static.flickr.com/8173/7974255288_1ac2f12a62_h.jpg

If I go to flickr to the photo URL https://www.flickr.com/photos/dawolf/7974255288/sizes/l/ and select 1600px version the working link is different:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8173/7974255288_086bcfb6a4_h.jpg

cheers,
Daniel

This is weird – the URLs don’t align with what Flickr says they should be. According to Flickr’s documentation the format of the URL should be https://farm{farm-id}.staticflickr.com/{server-id}/{id}_{secret}_[mstzb].jpg, and the secret is consistent across all sizes but Original (o). But here it looks like the secret is different.

While I haven’t come across this in the past, I did some investigation and I found a way to handle this. Unfortunately the fix is non-trivial and will take some time to put in and test out.

The stopgap I can suggest is to go for one size smaller, while I figure out how to handle this.

Thank you for your fast response and the links. I tried out adding the url_h parameter to the API request and it works. Mostly.

I put a longer write-up on my findings up on the Flickr Help forums:
https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157689276350136/

Turns out it will not be easy and still may fail for older images.

The code I changed is in Photonic_Flickr_Processor.php and does help with the 1600px sizes.

Line 84 – extend the $flickr_params
$flickr_params['extras'] = 'description,url_h';

around Line 585 – change the way the main_image is returned in build_level_1_objects()

if(!empty($photo->url_h)) {
  $photo_object['main_image'] = $photo->url_h;
  } else {
  $photo_object['main_image'] = 'https://farm'.$photo->farm.'.static.flickr.com/'.$photo->server.'/'.$photo->id.'_'.$photo->secret.$main_size.'.jpg';
  }

This helps a bit for my site. Thanks for taking the time looking into it ??

Cheers,
Daniel

I wasn’t expecting a full solution to be posted – thanks for that! ??

Strictly speaking, just to be safe I am going to go ahead and add url_k, url_h, url_o and every other size to the extras so as to future-proof the solution. Then, for every type of size (thumbnail, main_image and tile_image) I will perform the type of check that you have in the above and default to what currently exists.

For good measure I might even throw in a largest option, that will automatically pick the largest size available, to take the guesswork out of this.