Playing With Flickr

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It's interesting, isn't it? Flick is a website that I have been part of since 1996 and I have been so distracted by Facebook, Instagram and other social networks that I have forgotten about it. Several times I expected the website to wither and disappear but it hasn't. It is still around and it still has an active community. What's more, this is so many magnitudes better than Instagram. for a start it has tagging, groups, albums and everything else. Secondly you have galleries and more. You can control who sees what and when. You also have access to the API with a minimum of effort. I mention this last fact because I am tempted to play with it soon. I feel ready.

A yellow flower in Grens

The flickr API is available with an API via an SDK for a number of languages. It is available via PHP, Node.js and other platforms. Ideally I'd create either an app that would show "Today's pics" or "Weekly pics" or similar. The API has breadth and diversity so you can do a number of interesting things. I need to look at the diversity of options and choose one that I suspect I could get to work.

I have been studying for over a year now, and I have played with a number of platforms via courses but I have not taken the time to build something without having instructions. I need to get myself to a level where I am self sufficient. I managed with an instagram json file, so now the challenge would be to do the same accessing data via an API or similar.

Of course it could go pear shaped.

At this moment in time the idea is just to read, rather than to publish. When I write my daily blog post I could get the website to retrieve one of the most recent images from Flickr and use it as a featured image, rather than leave it blank. If I create or read then I can make mistakes, if I update or delete then I would have to spend time fixing my mistake. For those who are attentive I described CRUD.

It is a shame that the world forgot about Flickr. Flickr was and is still a good community website. If you follow people they follow back, and we don't see many adverts. We also come away from time spent on the website feeling refreshed.