Comments on: A little Flickr hacking (in a good way)

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:07:31 +0000

Isn’t this the same as http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.getJSON ?
Nice article though.

By: Chris Heilmann

Chris Heilmann — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:28:07 +0000

Jared exactly this is explained at the end of the original post.

By: Jared

Jared — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:07:28 +0000

It would be a real “hack” to get other sizes without having to authenticate. To my knowledge you have to have an API key to do that. But you could get another size by doing something like:

"http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2116/1552753330_d4c40d1132_m.jpg".substring(0, "http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2116/1552753330_d4c40d1132_m.jpg".length-6) + ".jpg"

The default is to return the “m” size, you can just remove that and add the .jpg back on. I’m sure there is a sexier method to do it, but that works.

I think the big uproar is seeing “flickr” and “hack” in the same title and having an alarm immediately raise (for me at least), then finding out it’s really nothing, let alone something already documented.

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:33:59 +0000

Isn’t anything that uses api.flickr.com “using the flickr API”?

By: Chris Heilmann

Chris Heilmann — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:30:58 +0000

Ok, for all the people repeating the obvious, please read the back story to my blog post. This was a talk at the Open Hack Day in India explaining for the “hackers” how to quickly get flickr photos in JavaScript without needing to resort to a backend authentication and other normal measures.

Yes it is not a hack, yes it is (almost) documented (show me a working example ON the flickr site that explains how to use and how to get the other sizes of the pictures). Well done. However, I was asked after the talk to quickly write something together and I did. I also admitted in my blog post that I had talked about that before. Shall I stop doing that?

By: Jared

Jared — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:44:46 +0000

I’m with Mortimer, this isn’t a hack, it’s a feature. A documented one at that. And not the “it’s a feature” joke when it’s really a bug.

By: Rey Bango

Rey Bango — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:44:15 +0000

@Christian: Sorry about the code. I’ve fixed it.

By: Mortimer

Mortimer — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:51:28 +0000

Hum, this hardly a hack as it’s documented at:
http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/

you also have other formats, like php, sql or yaml and other feeds than the public photos like someone’s contact photos, comments on your shots, etc…

You can see examples of this being used in the greasemonkeys and other hacks from Flickr Hacks and Flickr Pipes (the later using Yahoo pipes to make the most of the feeds).

These feeds are still pretty limited and you will soon want to use an API authenticated access ;)

By: Chris Heilmann

Chris Heilmann — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:48:48 +0000

That code example is mangled :)

Hey, there is never too much fun.