Print your Flickr photos automatically
Flickr is a photo sharing platform. Through Zapier, every new image can go straight to a printer: a black and white copy on a thermal receipt printer, or a full colour print on a photo printer driven by a Raspberry Pi.
Two very different ways to print an image
| Receipt printer, thermal | Raspberry Pi or Cloud Print Box | |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | Expedy XPDY80, HSPOS, Star Micronics | Your own laser, inkjet or photo printer, Kodak or DNP and the like, on USB |
| Result | Black and white, no ink, nothing to buy beyond the paper roll | Full colour, photo quality |
| Formats | .JPG .GIF .PNG, wrapped in the <IMG> tag |
.JPG .BMP .PNG .PDF, sent as a bare URL |
| Width | 398 px at 58 mm, 602 px at 80 mm, 1002 px at 104 mm | The printer's own format |
| Setup | Nothing to install | USB port set to LABEL after a scan, printer driver installed |
On a thermal receipt printer
Thermal printing uses no ink: the image is burned into the paper, so a print costs nothing beyond the roll. That is what makes it viable for a photo booth, an event or a loyalty coupon.
The trade-off is the rendering. The documented requirement is flat black on a white background, at the exact width of your paper, 5 to 15 KB, served over HTTPS. A colour photo taken straight from Flickr will not come out as is: convert it to black and white and resize it first. Every constraint is listed in Image and Logo.
In the Zap, the message is the <IMG> tag wrapping the image URL:
<IMG>https://example.com/photo.png</IMG>
On a photo, laser or inkjet printer
For real photo output, the job goes to your own printer, connected by USB to a Raspberry Pi or a Cloud Print Box adapter. Laser, inkjet, label and dye-sublimation photo printers such as Kodak or DNP all work, as long as their driver is installed.
Run a USB scan on the device page, set that port to LABEL, and send the image URL on its own, with no tag:
https://example.com/photo.jpg
See Installation on Raspberry Pi and PDF printing.
Build the Zap
- Pick Flickr as the trigger app and the event that fires on a new image
- Add Expedy Print as the action, then Create a Print Job
- Connect your Expedy account with your Expedy SID and your Expedy TOKEN, both on the printer page of the Expedy console, in the API Keys & UID card
- Enter the Printer UID of the machine that will print
- In the message, put the
<IMG>tag on a receipt printer, or the bare image URL on a photo printer
Step by step on the Zapier side: How to integrate Expedy Print with Zapier
Depending on the connector or the software you use, this setup may be handled by your partner or your agency. Check with them before you start.