Flickr enriches their API even further
Flickr has enhanced their already rich API even more by adding methods for creating, editing, and deleting “notes”. I’ve been waiting for this so that I can integrate notes features better into my Flickr Gallery WP plugin.
The preliminary plan is to try to use FotoBuzz as an optional interface for adding notes to your Flickr photos through my plugin. This will require a bit of work because I will have to re-write the open source back-end (released under the LGPL) of FotoBuzz to store notes on Flickr instead of embedding them in the image files. To do this I have to figure out how to talk to the front-end of FotoBuzz, which is just going to take some experimentation because the Flash (yuck) GUI part of FotoBuzz is closed source (but still free to distribute because it is released under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license) and undocumented.
Hopefully I will get some time in the next few days to work on this a little. I’m pretty excited about it.
Other features I’ll hopefully be adding to the plugin in the next few days:
- Ability to create human-readable (or at least more friendly) URIs with the help of mod_rewrite and .htaccess files
- Options to show the CC license photos are released under
- Options to choose which visibility level to display (public, friends, family)
- Probably a couple more bug fixes (as my rag-tag band of testers find bugs)
The notes methods aren’t the only enhancements Flickr has added to their API. They’ve also added the following:
- A ’server’ attribute to flickr.photos.search – see the URL building guide for tips on using it
- A couple changes to dates
- flickr.people.getInfo now returns ‘firstdatetaken’ which is the earliest ‘date taken’ of the all photos the user has uploaded
- flickr.photos.search now supports searching with date constraints via the ‘min_taken_date’ and ‘max_taken_date’ parameters
- flickr.photos.getInfo now returns the taken date as well as the posted date and has moved date attributes into a child element
- Now dates are set-able with flickr.photos.setDates
- More information on tags and how to use them with the API
The API is getting to be quite rich. It should meet almost everyone’s needs by now. The only things left on my wish list are comment handling (maybe something like a flickr.photos.comments.getList, flickr.photos.comments.getInfo, flickr.photos.comments.add, and flickr.photos.comments.delete?) and get-able (and maybe set-able?) EXIF data for photos.
Iveyrock's blog
December 8th, 2004 at 12/8/2004 8:05 am
I like your fotobuzz integation idea. I just look at it , it is really good if we can add it into this plugin!
Regards, Mark
December 10th, 2004 at 12/10/2004 4:29 am
I just found your script and since I was trying to write something similar, I’m just going to put yours on my website
Very nicely done. I just addedd the navigation on the single image page, i.e.: Gallery Home » Album Title » Photo Title
I could give you the code, but it’s really trivial. This would be nice to have in the next version, I think it improves the interface a bit.
I also think you should split the configuration part in another file, to ease upgrades and maybe allowing to optionally hide the “original image” link.
Great work man,
Michele
December 12th, 2004 at 12/12/2004 12:03 pm
There is an open standard for photo annotation at Fotonotes.net here: http://fotonotes.net/spec/index.cgi?FotoNotesSpecification and the open source code is here (for non commercial use): http://fotonotes.net/spec/index.cgi?Downloads. They have a flash viewer as well.
I heard Greg Elin present his photo annotation system a year ago and he has been working on Fotonotes for 4 years. Fotobuzz is very recent, and doesn’t seem to have as much information, though they apparently collaborated with Fotonotes on one spec (http://fotonotes.net/spec/index.cgi?CurrentFNAtomSchema).
Better to go to the source.
December 21st, 2004 at 12/21/2004 8:08 pm
works in wp 1.3?
December 30th, 2004 at 12/30/2004 3:32 am
Oops – I wish I saw this earlier. I’d second Joe’s sentiment – supporting FotoNotes is a good thing – once there is a consensus on a standard, we’ll definitely support it (and once we have some spare time, we’ll definitely try to kick in and help make it happen). There is an open source version of FotoNoter (similar to Fotobuzz) available via the FotoNotes wiki as well: http://fotonotes.net/spec/index.cgi?FotoNoter – demo @ http://fotonotes.net/fotonoter/fotonoter.html
January 6th, 2005 at 1/6/2005 7:01 pm
Wow, your like doing everything I want to built. I was at first really exited at FotoBuzz but I ive gone off the idea slightly because of where exactly the notes are stored.
Im using a simple gallery atm but I really want cool features such as notes and tags, at the moment this means installing some ugly php + database software thats unvalid and smells of sick or trying to build something myself.
fotonotes seems like a good idea but I found the demo to be quite awfull.
hmm Just looked at that last comment about fotonoter, that might need looking at further, it seems slightly slower than fotobuzz.
Ill be keeping tracks on this one tho.