Flickr Hacks / Discuss

mortimer?    says:

Ok, here is a little "hack" for all you greasemonkey coders that are looking for a way to make flickr api calls with authentication (send to group, tag photo, etc..).

There was the method introduced by Latchie (for the batch page enhancer) that I improved (for the group page enhancer) that handles all the authentication stuff for you, but needs the user to go back and forth to allow your own API key to do stuff. This one can be used easily, but it requires:
1- interaction with the user
2- a lot of GM_xmlhttprequest
3- to store values, etc...

it's therefore a "complex" code behind the scene, prone to bugs and highly depend to the flickr page design (for interaction with the user).

But you can do all that far more easily and get the READ and WRITE permissions to the user (if logged) account directly. After all, Flickr is already doing it when you add tags, upload new files, etc... isn't it.

So, here is a code snippet to show you how to make Flickr API call by using the flickr javascript directly:

var self = this;
var listener = {
flickr_groups_pools_getPhotos_onLoad: function(success, responseXML, responseText, params){
self.displayResultsGroups(responseText,false);
// do whatever you want here....
}
};

unsafeWindow.F.API.callMethod('flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos', {
per_page: 24,
extras: 'date_upload,icon_server',
page:page,
tags: document.getElementById("standard_q").value,
group_id: this.groupID
}, listener);

In summary, you have to call the function unsafeWindow.F.API.callMethod with the following parameter:
- the API method
- an object representing the additional parameters. NB:
o the api_key, user_id, auth_token, sig etc... are already provided by flickr, you do not need to include them in there,
o the parameters are encoded by the flickr javascript lib, so no need to call encodeURIComponent on form values
- a listener object.

The last parameter, the listener object is an object with the callbacks function that should be called when the call returns. It has to have properties with the right names pointing to handler functions.

The listener property name are constructed as follow:
- the API method with the . replaced by _
- the xmlhttprequest event to listen to: onLoad for example
So, for the onLoad event of the flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos method, the listener is:
{flickr_groups_pools_getPhotos_onLoad: function(success, responseXML, responseText, params){...}}

The handle functions takes the arguments:
- success: has the API method call succeeded (was stat="ok" in the returned xml)
- responseXML, the xml document returned if any
- responseText, the raw text of the response
- params, the list of params sent to the API call (include the params you provided earlier and the sig, api_key, etc...)

Flickr API calls are now really easy to make this way from GM scripts. I hope that flickr people will not be too mad if we use it directly this way.
Posted at 3:51AM, 29 May 2006 PST ( permalink )