lpb's bloggyblog

I’ve just discovered something really useful, although i’m probably the last to know about this…

Flickr has built in short-url functionality!

If you wanted to share a picture you’d found on flickr, you’d naturally just copy and paste the URL, however Flickr URLs can, quite often, be quite long.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lpbarrows/4262434188/

for example.

However, in this age of Twitter and less is more, such a long URL is not very practical!

If you look at the source code of a Flickr page, you’ll see that they’ve added a Google Canonical tag. By itself, this isn’t that interesting. However that canonical tag is a short URL!

So, in our example above, that looong URL can be referenced as  http://flic.kr/p/7uE6bC – much shorter, and much nicer!