Working with the Flickr API

Flickr provides exemplary tools and documentation for their popular API and is also an excellent case study for social classification in the wild, so it’s worth taking a little time to understand their API.

  1. The App Garden is Flickr’s main API documentation page and the best place to start. From here you can “Create an App” (and get an API key), read articles on general topics (the Overview, REST Request Format and JSON Response Format are particularly useful for us), and see an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of methods that the API provides.
  2. Pick a method from that list that sounds like it might work for your purposes. For this example, we’ll look at flickr.tags.getListUserPopular, but any method in the Tags section is likely to be helpful. Skim through the documentation to make sure this looks like the right thing for you.
  3. Test the method using Flickr’s handy API explore tool (link for this method). If you’re logged in to your Flickr account, Flickr will even provide some sample user and photo IDs to fill in as parameters, which is handy. I like to fill in the White House Flickr account ID (35591378@N03), specify the “Do not sign call?” option and then click “Call Method…” to see the actual results in the box below. Flickr also constructs the full request URL for you.
  4. Inspect the results by copying and pasting the URL into a new browser window. View source in your browser to see the structure of the actual response in XML.

Once you have this URL, you have a couple of options. From Python (in a GAE app, say), you can urlfetch this content, use BeautifulSoup to parse the results and then store or analyze this data. Or you can access this URL from the client-side using jQuery. If you want to take that approach, there are a couple of additional steps you’ll want to keep in mind.

  1. Specify the JSON response format, which you can find documented here. You’ll want to add &format=json to the end of your URL.
  2. Access the API using JSONP. If you’re accessing the Flickr API from a standalone web page (rather than from a Chrome extension, say), you’ll need to use jQuery’s $.getJSON method with the ?callback=? option. But, one particular quirk of the Flickr API, you need to rename this to jsoncallback rather than just callback.

Once you’ve made it through all of these steps, you should be able to pull in data from Flickr to use in your language of choice. If you use getListUserPopular, you can construct a graph in Protovis to see the distribution of tags by White House photographers. Please forgive the rudimentary aesthetics of these graphs, I’m still learning Protovis myself.

Linear scale visualization of flickr tags
(The linear scale shows the clear outliers of DC and USA; switching to a log scale makes the rest of the data visible.)
Log scale visualization of flickr tags

This (short) code sample is available in the repository, so you can see code for accessing Flickr, parsing the response, and visualizing the data in Protovis. (If you make improvements to the visualization, feel free to commit your updates!) The sample uses my Flickr API key, so if you’re going to use this for anything beyond exploratory testing, please create and use your own key.


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