The problem: obtaining a feed from Flickr devoid of the “username has posted a photo:” and with bigger images.

The solution: using Yahoo! Pipes to manipulate and tweak the image parameters and remove the unnecessary words.

Items used are:

1. The Fetch Feed element (available under “Sources”.
   Here’s where you paste the feed of your Flickr photostream feed which looks like
   http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?yourflickrid
   If it’s of one of your tags it will follow with
   &tags=tagname
   Other options in the url are:
   &format=rss_200

2. The Regex element available under “Operators”.
   You can add as many rules as you need. In this case you need to intercept mostly stuff in the “item.description” of the feed.
   In the first five rules you substitute the parts which form the HTML code of the “username has posted a photo:” line (where username is the name you use on Flickr).
   The following rules use some other subsitution to show the bigger image, putting here and there the “_m.jpg” in the url which is Flickr’s convention for medium images’ url.

3. The Pipe output element, which is how all of Yahoo! Pipes end and generate a new feed.

My personalized version of this pipe is at pipes.yahoo.com/nicoladagostino/flickrmcit (where you can view the source and even clone it for your own needs) and is fed daily through FeedWordPress to my upcoming website www.mondochrome.it.