26 posts tagged “flickr”
When I posted about lib-flickr-minimal, I noted that the newly-launched flickr.places.placesForUser method made a more interesting demo of data you could fetch when authenticated than, say, showing a user's most recent private photos. Evidently the developers at Flickr agreed it was an interesting concept, because over the last couple of months that area of the API has been extended considerably, As a result, I've expanded the demo into an AppJet application of its own.
Where? What? When? is the result. It shows you, on a map, the locations with the most photos according to a given criterion: by default, that's a tag, but it can also show your photos, or those from your friends and family, or your contacts. You can then inspect a place and see the most recent relevant photos, or the most popular tags, for that location.
How did that evolve from the initial demo app? Instead of simply printing a table based on Flickr's response into the document, I directly plotted the results on the map. I added a small form to enable the choice of criteria, and when Flickr added the placesForTags method, I added that as a choice. Belatedly, I realised that would also work for users without authentication, so I removed the requirement to authenticate, and made tags the logged-out default. (The image above shows a slight change to the initial results: it's the same tag, London, but at the neighbourhood, not locality, level. All of the locations are within the greater city's area, which probably won't be a surprise, but that's not true for Paris. Evidently, what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay there.)
The design of the application isn't quite settled, but I knew I wanted to replace the standard Google Maps pushpins with partially-transparent circles. Initially, I went with red, but when I showed it to colleagues, they said it reminded them of maps of bomb blast radii, so I spent a while looking around for the right colour, before settling on a yellow. The circles themselves are scaled according to the natural log of the number of photos for that location; I played with square roots as well, but I feel that logarithms give the right sense of scale.
The last piece of work I did was adding tag display for locations, using the tagsForPlace method. These tags can be surfed: clicking on one will load a new search for the given tag. It's noticable that the first few tags for most places are almost always place names, while common tags seem to share a familiar pattern of scattered, similarly-sized circles across the US, Europe, south-east Asia and coastal Australia.
There's still a few things I could add; tag persistence in URLs (to make it easier to share pages), better loading indicators (especially initially), options on which photos are shown, and links to view the search on Flickr itself, for example. There's also a missing question: while the API methods support maximum and minimum times, I haven't yet added options to allow you to show When? However, for now I think I've done enough (and I'll note that the site has a link to view the source of the application, if you fancy hacking on it yourself.) Enjoy.
A few weeks ago, when I was finally prompted to write up my EXIF to machine tags script, I parenthetically remarked that
ways of getting all predicates for a namespace, and values for a namespace (at least within a given user's photos), would have made my list for 'things you'd like to see in Flickr' if I'd felt able to get away with being so demanding
Funnily enough, a mere week after posting that, Aaron Straup Cope posted to the yws-flickr group, announcing exactly what I'd obliquely asked for: methods to work with the parts of all machine tags on Flickr. I set to work, and by that weekend had produced a machine tag browser.
Thanks to some coding help from Tom Insam and suggestions by Ryan Gallagher, the currently live version is a fair bit nicer than the initial version. The code is still a bit of a mess internally (there's far too much repetition), there are some bugs (values with full stops (or decimal points) in particular), and I still have three items on the TODO list.
Despite this, it's still sufficient for users to see that the astrometry.net system has been able to solve about 85% of the images it's processed; that three images have had an ImageMagick Lomo effect applied before upload; the names of Len Peralta's monsters by mail; and where people take screenshots in Second Life. In fact, I've been pleasantly surprised to note that the code.flickr blog mentioned it when Aaron launched machine tag heirarchies to the wider world.
As it says on the browser itself, the source code (all the clever stuff is in JavaScript) is available on github, and I'd love to recieve fixes, changes, or requests. In the meantime, have fun looking around.
Last week Kellan from Flickr published my interview on code.flickr. I'm still somewhat amazed that they chose me to ask, but then I'm also pleased at how much people are liking snaptrip, and I'm happy to see my words in print, as it were.
I actually compiled my answers a couple of weeks before it was posted, hence the reference to groupr as a "lost project". Now, of course, it's back, but I've already posted a couple of times about that. What I would like to do is - finally, and belatedly - document (and update the released version of) my EXIF machine tagger.
Why bother with such a thing? Flickr will extract EXIF metadata, but it won't allow you to do any aggregate queries on it. (Well, that's not quite true; at dConstruct 2007 Tom Coates leaked some URLs which I picked over, but they don't cover all the useful things I'd like. Plus, it's not documented.) By extracting all the data from my photos into machine tags (and a local SQLite database), it becomes possible to point people at all the photos taken at the wide end of my widest lens, or those taken with a particular make of camera (and to do more complex queries locally).
With that out of the way, how do you go about such a thing? Well, as usual, it's actually a fairly simple joining operation. Get a list of photos, and for each of them, get the EXIF data (using flickr.photos.getExif), then store the data locally, and add tags back to Flickr. There's not much munging invovled - I convert spaces in the EXIF field names to underscores, and some things get put in the "file:" or "camera:" namespace, rather than "exif:" - so it's all pretty straightforward. (I do preserve spaces in the EXIF values, though, by quoting my arguments to the addTags method.)
I also add an meta:exif field with either "none" or the epoch seconds of the time of tagging, so that it's easy to exclude previously-tagged images from being examined again. Another minor niggle is that, to add tags, a script has to be authorised. I copied the code chunk from the flickr_upload script in a Perl module, and it seems to work for me.
However, the fact that users need to get an API key, secret, and then a token, is naturally going to limit the audience for such a script. A few other users have metadata in the "exif:" namespace, but it's not exactly common. It's hard to turn the script into a web app, too, since it needs about a second per image to run, and the first run has to examine your entire library, which these days is typically thousands of images. I may still do it, but I haven't bothered for months, so I wouldn't count on it.
Another drawback is that machine tags are normalised at Flickr. This means that when I query on exposure bias, both -1/3EV and +1/3EV show as just "exif:exposure_bias=13ev". I've been thinking about ways around this - by querying raw tags - but it's not straightforward. (Ways around this normalising, and ways of getting all predicates for a namespace, and values for a namespace (at least within a given user's photos), would have made my list for "things you'd like to see in Flickr" if I'd felt able to get away with being so demanding.)
One final observation is that the script's in Perl, and uses XML (which is, apparently, sometimes compressed at Flickr's end; at least, I had to add Compress::Zlib at one point for some reason). If I was to redo it, either in Python or Ruby, the data would all be fetched as JSON, and it'd probably get a few more users. Ah well. Installing the prereqs shouldn't be too hard.
That said, of course the script, as is, proved useful. I run it manually after an upload, while Tom, who is (as ever) a bit more sensible, has his fork running as a cron job. Either way, please download it, play, and feel free to let me know what you think.
I've finally launched a new version of groupr that includes a view that I've wanted for ages: recent photos in your groups. Like this, in fact:
The obvious inspiration for this is Flickr's own recent photos from your contacts page, which, as the name suggests, shows photos that your friends, family and others have posted to the site, in reverse chronological order. It's a great leaping off point if you want to follow other people's work, and I'm sure that without it I wouldn't use Flickr nearly as much.
It's pretty self-evident that a similar page for your groups would be a good idea, then, and it has been much requested over the years. The problem is that building it isn't easy. You have to deal with the API join: to get information on the photos in each group you have to make an API call, so for 140 groups, that's 140 calls, each taking up to a second.
For a while, I thought this was an insurmountable problem for groupr: nobody's going to wait for over two minutes for a page to load. However, this problem also exists on the groups page, and so I solved it the same way: by using client-side calls (AJAX, if you like, although technically I use JSON by preference), cached by the server for later use in generated pages.
Last week I started putting the theory into practice, and the final conceptual leap was in the order I made the group calls. Initially, I queried the groups in alphabetical order, but it occured to me that the more photos were in a group, the more likely it was to have recent updates. Of course, this isn't perfectly reliable, but having made the change, it seems to work; typically, the "recent photos" page fills up with the most recent photos fairly quickly.
(I use a similar technique on the page that lists your groups, and lets you sort them in various ways. The list page needs a little more work, but I expect it's still handy.)
Having finally implemented this, I'm pleased at how easy it was now I've laid the groundwork, and also a bit surprised that nobody's ever done this before. Hopefully the recent view page will prove useful to some of you. Feel free to leave comments here if you're seeing errors or have suggestions on how to improve it.
groupr (my little JavaScript application that gives users an overview of their Flickr group membership) needs to be able to communicate with Flickr. That's really not hard; getting the most recent public photos posted by a user can be done trivially, either using feeds or the API proper.
However, most of the calls that you need to write really interesting applications require authentication, so that they can see private data. Rather than use the password antipattern, Flickr uses a well-thought-out multi-step system. Unfortunately, this can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around, and harder still to debug. It was certainly something I spent a while grappling with for groupr. That's the main reason I've split out the parts of groupr that talk to Flickr into a library on AppJet called lib-flickr-minimal.
As the name suggests, the library doesn't actually do that much. There are methods to handle the steps of authentication, and there's a generic function to call any Flickr method. However, it's more than enough for me to write both groupr, and a little demo application that guides other users through the process of handling authentication.
(A little on that demo application. I spent a few minutes trying to think of a method that required read privileges that would not be too obvious and dull ("you have 500 private photos", for example). Thankfully I remembered the recently-launched flickr.places.placesForUser method, and so I decided to use that as my example call. A bit more work meant I could plot the places returned onto a Google map, so now you can see where you've taken (or at least, geotagged) the most photos.
Ideally I'd rewrite this to produce something prettier, like Dopplr's lovely raumzeitgeist images, but for now, it's a nice little one-page example.)
Philosphically, I prefer this style of library. There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to building such things. You can tell from the source of the library that I'm in the "least possible work" camp: provide helpers for the functions that are tricky, but for most calls, let the user consult Flickr's documentation to figure out what to call, and use JSON as a return format to make everything that you get back an object (or at least, a rich data structure).
The other camp, which I think of as being influenced by Java and other less dynamic languages, wants to provide a method for everything. As a result their implementations tend to have lots of boilerplate code for handling every single Flickr method (there are about a hundred now), and more for parsing the returned XML (rarely, if never, JSON) and add to it convenience methods for such things as constructing URLs.
While the latter style is probably superficially appealing (you get documents in one place, and the library can error-check locally) it also has significant drawbacks. When Flickr add a method, or extend the returned data, the library has to be patched and re-released. Many libraries only implement the methods of interest to the author, leaving chunks of the API unimplemented. (These are particularly annoying for me; they tend to implement flickr.photos.search, which seems to be the cornerstone of the Flickr API, but ignore the interesting methods around the edges, which I seem to be drawn to.)
There is a nice middle way, which is to use metaprogramming and the API's own reflection methods to construct a list of allowed calls and arguments, giving error-checking but also updating automatically when Flickr add methods. The libraries I prefer for both Python and Ruby do this, and very nice they are too.
To be honest, this is probably where I want lib-flickr-minimal to end up, but for now, I'll happily take a library that stays out of my way rather than one that aims to do everything but only implements a few things. Hopefuly others on AppJet, or those looking to implement Flickr authentication, will find it useful too.
Long-time readers here may remember groupr. (If you don't, it was a small web application that loaded the photos in your Flickr groups, something that, oddly, you can't do on Flickr itself.) I wrote it at the beginning of 2007 for Fotango's Zimki platform. Of course, when that died at the end of last year, groupr vanished, but not before I took a backup of the code and templates underlying it, in the hope that one day I might be able to revive it.
For a few different reasons, I've been considering bringing groupr back recently. I could use Google's App Engine, as I've done for snaptrip, but that was from scratch, and for this project, I didn't fancy porting both the code and templates. I had a quick look at Helma and Trimpath, but I didn't get on with either of them. There's also the fact that they they're not hosted solutions, and part of the joy of server-side JavaScript (SSJS) is not having to worry about finding a server. I also tried Reasonably Smart, but you have to be pretty clever to get git working, and I couldn't, so that was out.
Eventually I found AppJet, and after a quick look I was convinced that this was probably a good place to end up, and after about eight hours to port what I had, and another five or so to fix up some things I never quite polished off on the old version, you can now use groupr.appjet.net.
So, how does it compare to Zimki, and how hard was it to port the code? (After all, big names are now talking about portability in the cloud). Well, AppJet may be closed source, but they offer a downloadable JAR which ran without any effort for me on Mac OS X, meaning both that I could develop locally (even offline, with cached data), and that if AppJet vanishes (which, after all, happened to Zimki) I can take groupr and run it on a server of my own. In this case, practicality trumps theoretical openness.
AppJet's IDE feels a lot nicer than Zimki's did (although I barely use (or used) either, preferring BBEdit with AppJet's JAR, or Trawler for Zimki). I also approve of the way that libraries are handled (they're just apps whose name includes the 'lib-' prefix) is pretty nice. You can see what is using a library and there's provision for inline documentation too. The community feels bigger than Zimki's ever did (although that might just be because the idea of SSJS is taking off), and I was able to find a few useful libararies (such as a TrimPath template port) pretty easily. Speaking of libaries, AppJet's 'storage' is oddly non-core, but it's a pretty nice row-style store with nice querying facilities. It lacks Zimki's handy "expires:+2h" syntax, but that wasn't too hard to fit in myself.
One definite annoyance I have with AppJet is that they don't keep all their libraries out of the global namespace. Zimki's functionality was all hidden in a zimki object, but AppJet has a few top-level standard libraries, and 'page' and 'response' both clashed with names I was using in groupr's previous version. Another is that there's no way of handling non-JavaScript files, so both static files and templates are tricky. I've ended up with the former being hosted on my main server, and the latter as a hash of triple-quoted strings (a Python-ism that AppJet has imported into their JS runtime). Proper file support, like Zimki had, would be a boon there. However, both of these were pretty easy to overcome, and it turned out Zimki did very little that AppJet couldn't replicate. (Replacing the (Mojo, I believe) API calls was four lines of jQuery; replacing the server-side API cleverness, for my needs, was a few lines of JSON.)
Overall, then, I think I'm pretty happy with my experience so far. I've managed to revive the project without too much hair-pulling, and, as I said, even extended it from the state it was in on Zimki. Maybe server-side JavaScript has a future after all?
A week or so ago, the lovely people at Flickr launched their new iPhone-specific mobile site. It's very nicely done, and there's one thing in particular I noticed that I've always wished for on their main site.
Having had a (years-old) desire for this feature on the website rekindled, I decided to spend a few hours with Greasemonkey seeing if I could make it happen, and I managed to do so, thanks largely to people who've led the way. Here's show_flickr_contact_context.user.js.
However, before you go charging in to install it, I should probably warn you that it's very much still at the "proof of concept" stage. Flickr's context boxes are surprisingly complicated little blocks of HTML, and (perhaps ironically) I haven't made any of the JavaScript in them work. Moreover, it seems that I've broken the functionality in existing context blocks. Moreover, the script only works when you've come directly from the Photos from your Contacts page, or if it detects an argument that it sets in the URL from the context paging block.** This is because the API call the script needs to make seems to be quite a complicated one, so I'm trying very hard to be polite with the usage of it.
Anyway, I thought it'd be nice to document even though it's really only getting going, so feel free to have a play with it. If I do tidy up any of its rough edges, I'll be sure to mention it here.
* A couple of minor notes on the implementation. On the plus side, it obeys the setting on the Photos from your Contacts page that sets whether or not you see five or one image from each. However, there's no way to modify this on the phone itself. Unfortunately, it's also hard to change contexts; in other words, to swap from paging by contacts to paging within a user's photostream. Both compromises are down to the lack of space for UI on the iPhone, though, so I'm hardly going to really complain (hence the hiding this in a footnote).
** Ideally I'd do this using Flickr's own convention: /photos/name/id/in/contacts/. Unfortunately, if Flickr finds a /in/ argument it doesn't understand, you get redirected and lose the context, so I'm using /photos/name/id/?contact=in instead. Ah well.
Having finally got snaptrip out there, I'm hoping you'll allow me a little (pretentious?) waffle about why I wrote it, where it fits, how I made some of my decisions, and what's next.
I'm a big fan of Flickr's machine tags. Most of my images have at least ten - mostly generated automatically, like my EXIF machine tags - and I tend to add geographic metadata as well. As such, it's probably not a surprise that I'd write an application that made Dopplr trip IDs available. The big surprise is that I bothered to make it accessible to most people, by building it as a website not a script.
Why a website? Well, I thought I'd like a nice interface as much as anyone, and I also know that to make a machine tag truly useful you need as many people as possible using it. Asking folk to download a script, get a key, and use a command-line interface - or no interface at all - isn't going to work.
Speaking of Dopplr, I don't think I've seen a talk by anyone there since it started, but I do think I've picked up their philosphy from slides and abstracts online. The phrase that tends to crop up is a "coral reef", the idea being there's a web of data that's available on the internet and that by doing one thing, and doing it well - the old Unix philosophy, really - that you can live in a happy niche. Well, snaptrip lives on part of the coral built by the two companies whose API it consumes.
I'm not under any illusions: it's likely that most users won't care about their past trips, or matching their Flickr photos. Those who do will probably only visit the site once, tag a few trips, and then leave. That's fine.
In my previous post I alluded to some decisions I made about the geotagging features in snaptrip. To be honest, it wasn't something I'd considered at first, but seeing Richard Crowley's Dopplroadr hack - which does some of the same things as snaptrip, but when they're uploaded rather than by looking for existing Flickr photos - made me consider the possibility. However, because I am looking at things that have probably accumulated metadata already, snaptrip is careful not to overwrite any information that's already there.
snaptrip adds fewer tags than Dopploadr. It won't add human-readable tags at all, and it adds the geographical data at a relatively low level of accuracy. I didn't want snaptrip to assert with precision that all these photos were taken dead in the centre of Copenhagen, since they probably weren't. My US trips show exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about: most of my pictures are actually taken anything from ten to two hundred miles from where Dopplr thinks I was staying. Similarly, it doesn't set a woe:id machine tag, instead preferring to use the dopplr:woeid namespace/predicate pair.
It's quite possible I'm overdoing the paranoia here, and so I'll probably add the option to set more tags later, but for now, I'm happy to tread lightly. (In that vein, snaptrip doesn't set a visible "snaptrip" tag, like many apps (Shozu and AirMe spring to mind; Picnic also suggests adding its tag). However, it does set a dopplr:tagged=snaptrip machine tag, and I should probably make that optional also. For now, you can use Flickr's tag tools to delete it.)
So, what's next? Well, the basic functionality I wanted seems to be there and stable, so I'm now considering two further avenues. I'm trying to develop tools to give you some views on the aggregated data from your past trips, but perhaps I should instead be looking at tools to increase the amount of stuff in that Dopplr history. I've got a couple of ideas...
I'd hoped to do a lot to snaptrip over the weekend, and I pretty much managed to do what I hoped for. There's a lot of changes which went live today; a lot of them are kind of invisible, but hopefully they're all useful.
Firstly, there's some user interface changes that incorporate suggestions from people within Dopplr. You now have to authenticate with both Dopplr and Flickr before logging in; it was possible to use snaptrip with just the one, but it didn't really make a lot of sense. When you tag photos, they get a border in the city's colour (as they do if they've already been tagged). I've also removed the requirement to load all the photos before tagging them; you now get to do so in batches of 24.
Secondly, the behind the scenes changes. Google App Engine makes it really easy to use memcache to avoid loading data more than once, so I now use that, making reloading pages really quick. There's much better error detection, especially for when a network call to either of the services it relies on fails. I've also fixed the sort ordering in the statistics panel on the trip list page.
Thirdly, I've added a lot more functionality to make use of the location information on both sides. Your map now shows Flickr photos*, and it's a "slippy map", so you can zoom in and out and recenter it. (It also shows the departure point.) It's also possible to use the Dopplr information about trips to add photos to Flickr's map. I should probably make it clear here that snaptrip will never overwrite location data (or trip data) that you've added yourself.
Finally, I had a comment on a previous post asking why you couldn't see trip tags on Flickr. Assuming that snaptrip worked, then the machine tags it's added aren't even shown by default- you have to open the disclosure triangle in the right hand pane. However, if you're using Firefox and Greasemonkey, you can install the show-dopplr-links user script, which will display a badge and link - like those for Upcoming - on each photo page.
Hopefully this isn't the end- there are still features I want to add, and the usage of the app when DopplrHQ first publicised it was a pleasant surprise. I hope these fixes and additions make it useful for you, though.
* Usually. There's a philosophical point I hope to expand on in another post.
Just a quick note to say thanks to all of you who've been using snaptrip today, since it was mentioned on DopplrHQ's Twitter stream. As it says in the questions and answers on the front page, I'm still poking at lots of bits of functionality, and you may see the odd error when I haven't properly caught one of the web services I use failing to send back some text. Despite all that, I can see that the app's been fairly popular, and hopefully it's been useful.
However, I've just spent an evening tightening up some of the text, and also working on how to show that an image already has either Dopplr trip tags or location data. (You've probably noticed there's a link that doesn't work- I didn't expect to be releasing quite so soon- but it might give you a clue as to what's coming next.) I'll try and keep posting fairly regularly, but for now, thanks again.
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