Recently I’ve been looking at the APIs of a couple of websites, Twitter and Flickr. This post will be focusing on flickr, and the little app that I created using Actionscript 3 and the Flickr API.

The Flickr API really makes it easy to access all of the images on the site, and all of the information that it stores about them, using a series of http requests for everything from searching to obtaining geotag information. There are a number of API kits available, but the base Flickr API is so simple that on a small project such as this one it was just as easy to use as it would have been to learn to use one of the kits.

As a good example of how easy simple operation are: the only method used by this app is flickr.photos.search method, which is a request of:

http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=API_KEY_HERE&tags=SEARCH_STRING_HERE

The API key can be obtained from the Flickr site, and is attached to your account. The search string in the example below is whatever the user has input into the search box. This request results in a nicely formatted XML file containing basic information on all photos which meet the criteria specified, which can then be processed into your project and the information therein processed into URLs for images, user pages, photo pages, or just about anything else you could need.

This is the most basic form of the search method, for a full list of parameters click here.

Click here to view the Flickr Search App.

Aside from the Flickr gubbins, this app is a system of interactive tiles inspired loosely by the kind of interface found on touchscreen devices such as the Microsoft Surface. When the images found by the search are loaded initially they are positiond randomly, then as the mouse moves closer to them they form a neat grid. Each image links to its page on Flickr.

For more information on the Flickr API, check it out on Flickr Services.