I wanted to follow and respond to friends and family photos on Flickr thru a feed reader without having to comb thru the combined photostream of my contacts. I didn’t want to add individual feeds to my reader since this would be hard to maintain and I didn’t want to “unfriend” my contacts since that would be rude.

This required some light kung-fu on the Flickr API. Using the following feed url finally did the trick:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne
?user_id=<insert user id here>&display_all=1&friends=1
Remember to <insert user id here> and use your super-obscure Flickr uid (not the friendly login you’re accustomed to) found by logging in and visiting this Flickr Services page.

Wow, that should have been easier, but hopefully someone else can benefit from this.

Update: Turns out this was much easier to do, but a least I learned something about the Flickr API.