View iPhoto '08 Web Galleries in Safari's RSS reader

One maddening feature of iPhoto '08 and Web Galleries is that (please correct me if I'm wrong) if you subscribe to a gallery using the button at the top of the gallery, and you are in Safari and have iPhoto installed, the subscription assumes that you want to subscribe to the feed as a photocast in iPhoto -- it doesn't bring it up as a regular Safari RSS feed.

I keep my friend's Flickr photostreams as RSS feeds that are bookmarked, and Safari is great for viewing and seeing if there are new entries. It seems that the only method I have found for achieving a "plain old RSS" feed from the new web galleries in Safari is to open the gallery in Firefox and subscribe there. When Firefox asks for what reader to use for the RSS, select Safari in the pull down (or select Choose Application and navigate to Safari) and voila -- the feed will show up in Safai. From there, you can bookmark it however you like.

Maddening ... does anyone know how to stop Safari and iPhoto from working this way and just let me have the RSS in Safari instead of iPhoto?

[robg adds: In looking at the URL for a gallery, and the URL for the RSS feed that you see in Camino or Firefox, it looks like a pretty simple substitution to get the RSS URL. For instance, here's a fake gallery URL:

http://gallery.mac.com/joeuser#12345&bgcolor=black

To convert that to an RSS URL, replace the # with a /, and then add this at the end:

?webdav-method=truthget&feedfmt=photocastrss

So the final RSS URL for our fake example would be:

http://gallery.mac.com/joeuser/12345/?webdav-method=truthget&feedfmt=photocastrss

Within Safari, you could just edit the URL for the gallery to match the above, and then load that page. Safari will then display it in its built-in RSS reader (assuming that's what you've set as your RSS reader in its preferences). I'm not sure what URL they're using for the Subscribe button, but it's definitely not the RSS URL.]

tell application "Safari" activate set this_URL to the URL of the front document set the feed_URL to my convert_to_feed(this_URL) if the feed_URL is not false then set the URL of the front document to the feed_URL end if end tell on convert_to_feed(this_URL) if this_URL begins with "http://gallery.mac.com/" then set x to the offset of "#" in this_URL if x is 0 then return false else -- REPLACE THE # CHARACTER WIH A FORWARD SLASH set this_URL to (text 1 thru (x - 1) of this_URL) & "/" & (text from (x + 1) to -1 of this_URL) end if set x to the offset of "&" in this_URL if x is 0 then return false else -- REPLACE THE PARAMETERS WITH NEW PARAMETERS set this_URL to (text 1 thru (x - 1) of this_URL) & "?webdav-method=truthget&feedfmt=photocastrss" end if -- REPLACE HTTP WITH FEED set this_URL to "feed" & (text 5 thru -1 of this_URL) else return false end if end convert_to_feed

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View iPhoto '08 Web Galleries in Safari's RSS reader
Authored by: bewebste on Aug 15, '07 09:24:42AM

The iPhoto '08 installer puts a plugin called "iPhotoPhotocast.plugin" in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins. If you quit Safari, remove that plugin, then open it back up, then when you click on the Subscribe button, it will no longer pass the feed along to iPhoto. Instead, at least on my machine, you get an error message saying your browser doesn't support RSS feeds. This is kind of weird, but it's OK, since the message also contains the feed URL which you can copy and paste and is treated like any other RSS feed by Safari.

View iPhoto '08 Web Galleries in Safari's RSS reader
Authored by: mr. applescript on Aug 15, '07 11:01:06AM

Here's an AppleScript script that will get the URL of the front page in Safari, convert it to a feed, and then display the feed in the same page. Save it as a compiled script and put it in the Script Menu.

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