Displaying photos from your Flickr photostream doesn’t require a fancy plugin (though FlickrRSS is a great one if you prefer the plugin route). Instead, you can use a unique line of Javascript code generated directly from Flickr to show your photos in your sidebar, or wherever else you’d like to place them on your blog.

To get started, make sure you are logged into Flickr, and then check out the badge page. Now, follow these steps:

• For badge type, select An HTML badge
• Specify the photos you would like to display: all of them, photos tagged with a specific tag, or photos from a specific set
• Customize your layout. Say no to displaying your Flickr name and icon, then select the number of photos, which ones and size. Important: select none for orientation style if you plan on having your photos appear in a grid format!
• Choose colors, if any. (I recommend none.)
• Grab your code.

Grabbing your code is the important part. If you want the freedom to style your displayed Flickr photos in a specific manner (I definitely recommend this), then you will only need to grab the portion of code that begins with <script> and ends with </script>. The full code will look something like this:

My suggestion is to place that code within a DIV, such as <div id="flickr">Flickr code here</div>, and then use your stylesheet to apply formatting to that DIV. You can specify padding, borders and just about anything else in order to customize and improve how your photos look.

Psst. Check out Prettify your images for a general idea of how you can customize the display format of your photos.