How to create a RSS for the Photo Feed?

Insplisity

Hello,

I'd like to use the RSS Photo Feed in my app, but I don't want to use Flickr or Pinterest for hosting the pics.

Is it possible to upload the pics to various folders on my server, and create an RSS, which would serve those pictures to the app?

Thanks.

tamworthheat

1 option is to create your own .xml file and host it on your website.  The xml file simply points to your media and formats it for display.  The URL of your xml file is your feed url that you type in to Andromo.

A good tutorial can be found here:

http://www.reelseo.com/how-to-create-mrss/

You'll notice in the example the first line of the xml file is:

<rss version=”2.0″ xmlns:media=”http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/”>

This is because Yahoo created MRSS.  This is above basic HTML/WEB knowledge, but it's a great learn.

Insplisity

Thanks @tamworthheat, it looks useful! I'm sure this will help a lot.

Insplisity

I've managed to get the RSS working from my website. I've just saved the RSS file from Pinterest, deleted all the stuff I don't need, and replaced the links with my own links. It works like a charm.

By the way, the background is always white. Is there any way to change that in Andromo? I didn't try it yet, but if anyone has, I'd appreciate the answer.

Thanks!

tamworthheat

I THINK I remember Andromo saying that the card style for feeds is not customisable but i THINK if you use the standard style, the colour reverts back to the preferences you make in the STYLE tab of Andromo (I think).

Insplisity

Hey @tamworthheat, thanks, I'll try it out tomorrow, as it's already late here. Time to sleep.

Insplisity

Yep, the background can be adjusted in the Styles tab. Sweet. Thanks @tamworthheat.

Insplisity

The only problem is that preview images load very slowly and that they are in low-quality. I thought that if I upload them to my server, they will at least load faster. But the "slowness" is almost the same to that of Flickr or Pinterest.

Is this a RSS issues, Andromo issue, server speed issue, or something else?

@mark, @lorne, any ideas what could cause this?

Thanks.

EDIT: It takes about a minute to load 12 images. I have 243 of them. Each images is around 60 KB. However, when I view the RSS in my desktop web browser, the speed is normal (maybe a second or two for all images to load).

tamworthheat

Could be the construction of your xml file which needs to be as simple and brief  as possible, also try to have all images in the same place that the xml file calls, all images need to be optimised to as near zero file size as possible.  Try and show a small thumbnail for RSS lists and link to the larger file when clicked. The RSS list images only display at  a fraction of real images size, so may be 50x50px = 1kb  It can get a bit complex but also the power of a laptop will render faster than mobile so you can see a big difference when everything isnt optimised for mobile.I don't have loads of xp with this but main thing is any images you want loaded in a list should be as near 50x50px as poss

Insplisity

This is the structure that I use:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">

<channel>
  <title>App Title</title>
  <link>http://myserver.com/app/images/</link>;
  <description>App Description</description>
  <item>
    <title>Image Description</title>
    <link>http://myserver.com/app/images/</link>;
   
<description>&lt;&gt;&lt;img
src="http://myserver.com/app/images/01.jpg"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</description>
</channel>
</rss>

All
the images are in the same folder. But I'm not sure how would I create
the small thumbnails (in the preview) myself and link them to the bigger
pictures.

If you or anyone knows how to do this, I would appreciate the help.

Thanks.

meoldTest

The Media RSS spec contains an item for thumbnails:

http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss#media-thumbnails

If the thumbnail images are defined in the feed XML, those are the images that will be used on the photo feed's index page. Having a smaller thumbnail image available will increase the performance instead of having to resize each full size image to display on the index page. Pinterest isn't the best type to model your feed after. You'd be better off using Flickr as a model since it is a media rss feed type.

Insplisity

@darryl: Useful tip, thank you very much. So it's not my server, it's not Andromo, but the type of RSS I've been using. I was hoping that would be the case. I'll give it a try and report back how it goes.

Insplisity

I've updated my RSS and now it looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
        xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"
        xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
        xmlns:creativeCommons="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/creativeCommonsRssModule.html"
                xmlns:flickr="urn:flickr:user" >
    <channel>
           
        <item>
                   <media:content url="http://test.com/apps/sandbox/images/large/01l.jpg"
                   type="image/jpeg"
                   height="684"
                   width="912"/>
                   <media:thumbnail url="http://test.com/apps/sandbox/images/small/01s.jpg" height="100" width="100" />
        </item>

However, the images still load quite slowly and they look granular.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks.

Insplisity

I moved the thumbnails and images to a VPS from a friend of mine. However, the loading times are still very slow (25 thumbnails will load -  1 per second - then it all stops for a minute or so).

Is the reason maybe that RSS is not best suited for photo galleries? The code is as clean as it can be and made by the rssboard.org guidelines. Is anyone else experiencing this? @darryl, should I open a support ticket?

meoldTest

Sure you can submit a ticket to support with your feed URL so we can take a closer look at the actual feed data you're working with (you can make it private if you want) to see if there's anything out of the ordinary.

Photo feeds will certainly take longer than feeds without thumbnails given the fact that in addition to downloading the feed and parsing it, it must also download each thumbnail image. The thumbnail images are cached, so it will be quicker on future requests, unless of course there are all new images on the next request.

We can take a look though.

Insplisity

Thanks for the reply @darryl, I'll open a ticket tomorrow, it's already late here and I'm off to get some rest.

Insplisity

Just a quick update - Lorne helped me out and it seems it's a hosting issue.