Pheed RSS Specification

RSS has become very useful for distributing information. It is most often used to syndicate news stories and journal entries, but the format of RSS makes it useful to describe just about anything that can be organized into discreet units of information--including photographs. In fact, without any extension you can serve an RSS document that describes a collection of photos quite well. It does almost everything we want. News readers and aggregators will happily consume the information and people can subscribe to your feed and see when new photos are available. But in its current form people won't be able to actually see any of your photos. To address this problem we have taken advantage of the ability to add custom elements to RSS to extend its usefulness. With a couple of new elements you can describe photos and point to both thumbnail and full size images in a way that computers and people can both understand and use.

Pheed Elements

With the newest version of RSS came the ability to add 'modules.' A module is nothing more than a set of elements than extend what you can say with an RSS feed. A Pheed is simply an RSS document that contains a few other photography related elements. As such every valid Pheed should be a valid RSS 2.0 document.

Here is a short example: http://www.pheed.com/rss/example.rss

The RSS specification has many elements and you are free to include anything in your documents that is valid RSS. At the moment the pheed parser only pays attention to the following elements:

channel elements

<title> (required)
The title of this collection of images. We will refer to this pheed using the title text.

<link> (required)
A URL of a website that corresponds to these images.

<description> (required)
A short description of the collection as a whole.

item elements

A pheed must have one or more items. Each item represents a single image

<title> (required)
The title of the image

<description>
A description of the image. This can be thought of as a caption to the photograph. This text will be displayed with the photograph.

<link>
URL of a webpage related to this image. Most likely the URL of the page this image resides on your website.

<category >
The place in our in our image taxonomy where this image should be placed. We will be building the taxonomy as we go so this element is of limited use at the moment.

pheed extension elements

<photo:thumbnail> (required)
The ULR of a thumbnail sized version of the photograph. The maximum size of the longest dimension is 120 pixels.

<photo:imgsrc> (required)
URL of a larger version of the image, in other words, THE image. This is the URL we will link to when people want to see your picture.

Dublin Core extension elements

<dc:creator>
The creator of the image: you. It can be your name or e-mail address.

<dc:rights>
A statement about the copyright of this image.

<dc:coverage>
The location represented by the image. Be as specific as you can.

<dc:format>
The format of the original media of the photograph.

<dc:subject>
One or more keywords that pertain to your image. When people are searching for images this is their principal means of finding your image so think carefully about what you put here if you want people to find your photographs. Also, you are on the honor system with this tag. Don't include words that don't relate to your image or we will boot you.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.