How to aggregate multiple Flickr RSS feeds into a single feed for your Twitter stream

This simple technique works with any RSS feeds but I use it to follow my favourite photographers on Flickr. I get a Twitter notification whenever one of my Flickr contacts posts a photo, the tweet includes a link to the Flickr image page.

It is possible to send an RSS feed to your Twitter stream with Twitterfeed but as Aliza Sherman points out you get a more flexible service with dlvr.it, it's a simple matter to send an RSS feed using dlvr.it - just paste the RSS address and configure a few basic settings. 

You can subscribe to a Flickr photographer's RSS feed in the normal way and you can send that feed to your Twitter stream using dlvr.it but it's time-consuming to repeat the process for each RSS stream that you want to follow. The solution is to create a feed bundle in Google Reader:

  1. Assemble the feeds you want into a single folder within Google Reader.
  2. Hover over the folder name and use the drop down menu to select 'create bundle', follow the instructions.
  3. Now in Google Reader select Your stuff > shared items, you can see that you are sharing your new bundle.
  4. Now open your shared bundle: the easiest way to do this seems to be to select 'send to > Twitter', then go to your Twitter page and click on the link to open your shared bundle page. Here's the bundle of Flickr feeds that I created.
  5. On the page there will be an Atom feed link... copy the link and paste it into dlvr.it, follow the instructions.
  6. Dlvr.it gives you options to include the title of the post and body text as well as a prefix of suffix. For a Flickr bundle you should include both title and body so that the resulting tweet will be something like "Image title: Photographer Name posted a photo: image description http://dlvr.it/457Dv  #flickr" (I added the #flickr hashtag as a suffix).

I guess Flickr will enable integration with Twitter and other social services at some point, but until they do this is a nice way to receive Flickr update tweets.