As part of my talk on YQL for Open Hack London I’ve thought of an easy way to get Flickr photos that you are allowed to display in your products and hacks.

The wrapper API getFlickrBy works around the somewhat convoluted data returned from Flickr’s API methods and uses YQL to cut the information you want down to the bare necessities. Furthermore the API only returns photos that are licenced with Creative Commons’ “By” license to avoid you using photos you have no right to use (which is a big thing with the Flickr crowd).

The API endpoint is:

http://isithackday.com/api/getFlickrBy.php

You have several parameters to play with:

location

The location you want photos of as defined in the Yahoo Geo API

search

A word you want to search for

format

The format of the returned data, XML, HTML or JSON - preset is XML

callback

A name of a JavaScript function call to wrap the JSON data in, in case you want to use the API in a script node

amount

The amount of photos returned, max is 100 – preset is 20

size

the photo size, “s” for 75×75px, “t” for thumbnail, “m” for medium, omit to get big size

The API returns only what you need: the image title, the owner, the url of the image and the link to Flickr. If you use html as the output format it returns an HTML list of linked images. For output demos and explanations simply call the API without any parameters

Here are some examples how to use the API:

• Get 5 photos from Paris,France as JSON calling the function foo()
• Get 20 photos from Ankara as HTML
• Get 20 photos from London as XML
• Get 20 photos of bridges in munich as XML
• Get 10 photos of kittens json calling the function meow()

With the final planning steps for the London Open Hack Day this weekend, YDN just released two sweet handouts that explain the workings of BOSS and YQL on two pages each:

You can download them from the YDN test server, in case you want them in the office:

• YQL cheatsheet
• BOSS cheatsheet

Things that made me happy this morning:

• May the fourth be with you – it is Star Wars Day!
• The YQL console now lists community open tables from github
• The Bay Area’s public transport system has a very nice API
• A nice photo series of old game controllers and consoles as X-Rays
• James Broad has a good step by step tutorial how to use iSight for a timelapse video
• PopeyesJokes on YouTube shows that you can create a lot of UGC with a simple video editing suite and a lot of enthusiasm
• What not the crochet tells you exacty that.
• The iSnort is an iPhone app to either make you look properly Hollywood, or to get you kicked out of any club. Also check the disclaimer on the bottom of the page.
• A great list of code comments
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss has info on the worst REST practices to avoid
• Wedesigner Depot praises 1,2,3 as a good usability practice
• Some very dedicated hackers found 48,000 lbs of 70mm tape – the only copy of extremely high-resolution images of the moon in an abandoned McDonald’s and started digitizing them.
• An art student in the UK shows how to make a car disappear. Take that James Bond.

I love flickr to bits and I especially like the copy and paste boxes for embedding photos on my own photo stream when I check photos in different sizes.

What annoyed me is that this is not available on other people’s photos. That’s why I wrote a small GreaseMonkey script that embeds a text box with the a link and the medium sized image of the photo you’re currently checking out:

If you want to have the same comfort, simple Install the GreaseMonkey script flickr embed and save yourself some annoying steps of copy and paste.

I just came back from Paris where I talked apparently very animated to around 50 developers about all the goodies Yahoo offers developers:

• Get the slides without the notes [PDF, 8.6mb]
• Get the slides with notes [PDF, 8.6mb]

I’ve spent the ride on the Eurostar editing the recording of the talk. I simply used Audacity and the built-in microphone of my MacBook Pro so the quality is not stunning but does the trick.

• Listen to the audio recording of the talk [mp3, 41.1mb]

I like being in Paris, developers have very good and challenging questions there, the coffee and food simply rocks and I can be in and out in a matter of hours without having to wait at airports and spend hours in the air being unable to use my laptop. We’re now waiting for feedback what other talks people in Paris want us to give and I am sure I will be back before long.