In July 2010 we launched a new photo page that displays photos at up to 640 pixels on the largest side. In the months leading up to this launch we did a lot of work to support generating this new size, along with making our support of the Large image size more consistent.

Medium 640

We started adding support for the new Medium 640 size(_z suffix) on March 31st 2010. We generated a Medium 640 size for all photos uploaded after that date. Over the next couple months after that we found and corrected instances where we were not fully supporting this size. We display the Medium 640 size on the Photo, Photostream and All Sizes pages.

Dynamically Generated Images

If a photo was updated/uploaded before March 31st 2010 then we do not have a Medium 640 size on file and will try to dynamically generate it. We can do this if a large version of the photo exists, or if the original is a jpeg that has not been rotated(when you see an image URL that ends in _z.jpg?zz=1, the zz=1 indicates we can generate from an original). By doing this we make a lot of old photos display at 640 on the new Photo, All Sizes and Photostream pages. And every time we generate a Medium 640 image it gets cached, so we don’t have to generate it again for a while. If we can’t generate the image dynamically, we fall back to displaying the Medium 500.

Generating photos dynamically needs to be happen fast, so we don’t try to generate a Medium 640 from the original if the photo has been rotated or needs to be converted from a non-jpeg format.

Larges For All

We wished we had generated a Large size in the past for all photos uploaded, it would have made it simpler to dynamically generate the Medium 640 size. Before May 25th 2010 we only generated Larges for photos uploaded greater than 1280 in size, now we generate a Large no matter what size is uploaded. This is great for certain types of photos, for example we can now display 800×600 photos(common to some camera phones) as a Large in Lightbox or on the All Sizes page. So, a Large photo will be 1024 pixels in size on the longest side, or the same size as the original if something smaller than 1024 pixels was uploaded(we never scale a photo larger, an original photo of 800×600 will have a Large that is 800×600). You can expect the Large to always exist for newly uploaded photos.

Using the API

The best way to get the URL for a Medium 640 is to include url_z in the extras field when calling the flickr API. When photo data is returned, it will also include the full Medium 640 URL in url_z, along with height_z and width_z. Constructing the URL from the photo data returned will also work, but less reliably for photos before March 31st 2010.
http://farm{farm-id}.static.flickr.com/{server-id}/{id}_{secret}_z.jpg
See: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html