One of the key goals for this blog when we launched it 9 months ago was to be a channel for the voice of the Flickr development community. Most importantly all the amazing developers building on our APIs. Which is by way of introducing our third developer interview here at code.flickr, our first was with Neil Berkman of Photopholow, while our 2nd, and first in the 5 questions format was with Jim Bumgardner a few weeks ago.

We’ll be posting an interview from GustavoG (as tapped by Jim) soon, but in the mean time I want to post an interview from Paul Mison aka blech. Paul is an active participant in the Flickr API group, and I’ve personally been using and loving his new project SnapTrip. And he likes rainbows, which makes him good by us.

1. What are you currently building that integrates with Flickr, or a
past favorite that you think is cool, neat, popular and worth telling
folks about? Or both.

Paul: My current main project is snaptrip, which works with Dopplr, a website for sharing personal travel information, as well as with Flickr. It helps you to find photos associated with a trip listed in Dopplr, to label them so that Dopplr can find them easily later on, and also lets you geotag them (if you haven’t already). I’ve also written a Greasemonkey user script so that you can see when other people’s photos were taken during a Dopplr trip.

In the past I’ve mainly written command line tools; I used a script to migrate images out of my previous home-brewed image hosting to Flickr, and I have another that applies machine tags for EXIF properties (since tags make it easy to find photos; here’s all my photos with a focal length of 50mm). My great lost project was a web application called groupr that would let you see all the photos in groups you’re a member of, but unfortunately the platform I built it on was withdrawn, and I should rebuild it elsewhere (possibly on Google’s App Engine, like snaptrip; possibly not).

2. What are the best tricks or tips you’ve learned working with the
Flickr API?

Paul: The API Explorer is wonderfully useful, and it should be everyone’s first port of call when developing an application. Beyond that, I’d advise picking an API framework that does the tricky things (notably, user authentication – I’ve handcoded it myself, and it can be fiddly), but otherwise gets out of your way.

snaptrip uses Beej’s Python Flickr API, and I’ve previously used flickraw (for Ruby) and Flickr::API (for Perl). All three are nice and minimal, so that when new API methods are added, you don’t have to update your library. flickraw uses JSON internally, too, which is very nice if (like me) you lean towards dynamic, rather than static, languages.

For Greasemonkey scripts, this post from mortimer? about using API calls in GM scripts is great.

3. As a Flickr developer what would you like to see Flickr do more of
and why?

Paul: Well, a relatively minor request would be for JSON in the API Explorer. More seriously, there’s an entire class of methods I wish existed for groups. For example, the only way to track conversations at the moment is the group RSS feed, which isn’t segregated by thread. There’s no way to find out a group’s administrators or moderators. A final example is that the queue of photos awaiting approval isn’t exposed to the API. While I’m not sure I’d have used all of these in groupr, some of them would have been very handy.

Another small request would be for more extras, especially a few method-specific ones. In particular, I’d love to see ‘favedate’ on flickr.favorites.getPublicList.

4. What excites you about Flickr and hacking? What do you think you’ll
build next or would like someone else to build so you don’t have to?

Paul: For all that my answer to the last question was a demand for more methods, Flickr is exciting both because of the wealth of photography there, and the richness of the methods of getting at it. The geographical data, and access to it, that has emerged over the last year is really interesting, and I’d love to do something with it (and intend to, somehow, in snaptrip). However, for a complete new project, I’ve been poking for a year or so at making your Flickr favourites look a bit nicer, and maybe within another year I’ll actually have something out publicly. (I really need a simple job queue; anyone?)

5. Besides your own, what Flickr projects and hacks do you use on a
regular basis? Who should we interview next?

Paul: Well, as a Mac user, I’m a fan of Fraser Speirs Flickr Export for getting my images onto the site in the first place, and if I upgrade to an iPhone I look forward to playing more with Exposure. On the web, Dario Taraborelli’s Group Trackr is very nice, and I use fd’s Flickr Scout every now and again to see if anything’s hit Explore.

However, I think the most impressive recent project I’ve seen is a desktop app written using Adobe’s Air, called Destroy Flickr, by Jonnie Hallman. There were a lot of subtle UI techniques to hide the latency inherent in talking to a network service, so I think he’d be a great choice for an interview.

Kellan: Thanks Paul! And y’all be looking out for an interview with Jonnie and his oddly named project.