Flickr now offering real-time web APIs to developers
Flickr is improving the way developers have access to its massive digital photo library with the release of new web APIs.
Rolling out now in honor of Photo Hack Day (which is really a weekend being that it is both August 20th and 21st), these new codes enable developers to build new applications with real-time access to more than six billion photos.
Falling under the code name "flickr.push.getTopics," the new APIs continuously search millions of new photos each day automatically for developers, delivering new and updated photos in real-time. Updates can also come from over 50 institutions participating in the Flickr Commons including NASA, The Library of Congress, and the National Archives of the United States and United Kingdom.
Developers also have the option of subscribing to photo streams by geographic area, photo meta-data or social tagging like using the favorites feature and friend-tagging.
Up until now, photos could only be pushed out when subscribed to the contact and others marked as favorites. Flickr developer "nils" wrote on one of the photo sharing site's official blogs noted that process "barely scratches the surface of stuff that happens on Flickr that people might be interested in."
For more details, visit the code.flickr developer blog to view these APIs and examples of how they work in detail.
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