I’ve been poking around lately working on getting some design ideas together and investigating some technical possibilities, as well as backing up some old data. Erasing some of that old data resulted in the crazy progress bar pictured above. I’ve also discovered a really frustrating problem while investigating pulling Flickr streams.
It seems that you can do a few nice little searches that aren’t well publicized, so that you can, for instance, get an RSS stream featuring the union of two different Flickr tags in your stream (in other words, an OR search). The feed URL looks something like this (for the tags blue and green):
feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?
Replace the “tagmode” parameter with all, and you get an AND style search (only photos featuring all the specified tags). The problem is that the RSS feed provided by Flickr only allows you to grab 20 photos. If you perform the same search, you get a large amount of paged data, if there is more than one page. So, basically, this means that if you want to see ALL the photos of your children in your own home-grown chumby, OSX, or other widget, you are sadly stuck at seeing only 20.
“What about using something like Pipes?”, you say. Well, I checked out using Yahoo pipes to create a custom RSS feed. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, you are really limited to what you can get via the Flickr API. You can get more than 20 photos in 1 person’s photostream this way using the flickr.people.getPublicPhotos method, but that method does not provide the capability of filtering by tag.
I’d just about given up (well I still have for now) until I realized that you can do just this in the media bar in Flock, so there must be a way to do it that I am missing. In Flock, you can view your photostream and *fliter* by tags, and even use AND and OR for multiple tags. Not sure how they are doing this, because you can see way more than 20. I sent them an email to see what they are doing today. Anyone else have any idea?