November 14th 2006
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.