November 14th 2006 10:21 am

Fun With Flickr Feeds

Flickr has some really great web services, one of the easiest to use is the feeds service. To grab a set of data from flickr in XML format, just open the following URL in your application:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=[comma separated tags here]

by default, the feeds are returned in “plain” XML format, to make things more interesting you can specify a format parameter

prefer PHP data? just:

<?php
  include_once("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/\
                    photos_public.gne?tags={$tags}&format=php");
  // broken up to fit format, but in practice leave this as one line
  // i now have a $feed array set with all the feed data:
  print_r($feed);
?>

or perhaps json:
to use the json (in javascript) you must first define a function called jsonFlickrFeed which takes in one object. This object will be your flickr feed data, then below that in your HTML head, you include the feed url as a javascript src file:

  <head>
    <title>Flickr Testbed</title>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      var photos = null;
      function jsonFlickrFeed(feedData){
        photos = feedData;
      }
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/\
            photos_public.gne?tags=toothbrush,red&format=json">
    </script>
  </head>
...

to view all the other feed formats, check out the formats section of the Flickr Feeds page.

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