Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online (Paperback)

by Paul Bausch (Author), Jim Bumgardner (Author)
Key Phrases: authenticate yourself, ransom note, share your photos, Sharing Photos, Custom Applications, Cache Photos Locally (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Over two million registered Flickr users and counting have discovered the ease and fun of organizing their photo libraries, showing off their favorite pictures to the world, and securely sharing their private pictures with friends, family, or ad hoc groups. But Flickr's own plethora of intuitive menus, options, and features just scratches the surface.

Flickr Hacks goes beyond the basics of storing, sorting, and sharing your photos to the much bigger playground of what's possible. Whether you're a beginner looking to manage your metadata and play with tags, or a programmer in need of a detailed reference of Flickr API methods, you'll find what you're looking for here. In addition to getting under the hood of some of the most popular third-party Flickr toys already in the wild, you'll learn how to:

• Post photos to your blog directly from your cameraphone
• Mash up your own photos or others' public pictures into custom mosaics, collages, sliding puzzles, slideshows, or ransom notes
• Back up your Flickr library to your desktop, and save the comments too
• Set random desktop backgrounds and build your own Flickr screensaver
• Geotag your photos and map your contacts
• Download a list of photos and make a contact sheet
• Make your own Flickr-style tag cloud to visualize the frequency of common tags
• Build a color picker with a dynamic color wheel of Flickr photos
• Feed photos to your web site and subscribe to custom Flickr feeds using RSS
• Talk to the Flickr API using your web browser, Perl, or PHP; authenticate yourself and other users; and build custom API applications

About the Author
Paul Bausch is an independent web developer living in Corvallis, Oregon. When he's not hacking together web applications, he's writing about hacking together web applications. In 2003, he wrote Amazon Hacks for O'Reilly and recently completed the forthcoming Yahoo! Hacks. Paul also helped create the popular weblog application Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) and maintains a directory of Oregon weblogs called ORblogs (http://www.orblogs.com). When he's not working on a book, Paul posts thoughts and photos to his personal weblog onfocus (http://www.onfocus.com).

Jim Bumgardner has been making innovative and entertaining software in Los Angeles since the early 1980s, including The Palace avatar chat system. He is the founder of the Flickr Hacks group, and the creator of the Flickr Colr Pickr, Hipbot and other Flickr-powered applications. Jim works in the Interactive TV industry and teaches kids how to make videogames at Art Center in Pasadena. His personal website, KrazyDad.Com, showcases his more recent software experiments.

Product Details

• Paperback: 364 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; illustrated edition edition (February 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596102453
• ISBN-13: 978-0596102456
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #202,581 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This item is part of The O'Reilly Hacks Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible possibilities when using Flickr..., May 6, 2006

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Flickr is one of those web sites that has gone in directions I don't think anyone ever imagined it would go. What started out as simple photo-sharing is now a full-featured site with a programming API. Many of these are covered and explored in the book Flickr Hacks - Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online by Paul Bausch & Jim Bumgardner.

Contents: Sharing Photos; Tagging Photos; Viewing Photos; Community; Maintenance; API Basics; Custom Applications; Index

At the core, Flickr is a site to share pictures online with friends, family, or anyone else you open your pictures to. And pretty much, that's all I've used it for. I don't take a lot of pictures, but the ones I have taken that relate to shared experiences (like Lotusphere) have made it up there. In fact, someone sponsored me for a professional Flickr account (thank you!), but it's about ready to expire. I wasn't planning on renewing it at that level, but I may have to reconsider after reading this book. The book is about the size of a normal Hacks title, but there's only 50 hacks in here. As you can imagine, each one goes into much more detail than normal. And there *is* some fun stuff in here. If you have a little background in PHP or Perl, you can really get crazy, too. For instance, I didn't know you could email photos to your Flickr account. Hack #6 shows how that works, and it explains how Flickr can often serve as a real-time look into breaking events such as the London train bombing. People were using their cell phones to take pictures and then mailing them in to the Flickr account. Or for fun stuff, you can use the Flickr API to build routines to create "ransom note" messages (a different picture for each letter, "glued" together into sentences) in hack #47. Hack #48 shows you how to take one of your photos and create a "slider puzzle" out of it. And in between those two ranges you'll find a number of things that will cause you, like they did me, to say "Flickr can do that?"...

If you use Flickr and actively load photos out there, this will be a "must read" book to enhance and expand your Flickr experience. Even if you're just a casual user like me, you'll have your eyes opened to some new possibilities. Now where was that Flickr renewal email?

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bakari Chavanu MyMac.com Review, May 4, 2006

By	Tim E Robertson "Publisher MyMac.com" (Battle Creek, Mi United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

[...]

Flickr has to be the best and most popular photo sharing website on the planet, without doubt. Over the past year since I've been a member and wrote an article for MyMac on this number one shutterbug community. I've amassed a couple of dozen bookmarks and RSS feeds based Flickr and Flickr related websites. Some include RSS feeds to my favorite photographers, others include sites that help me do fun and cool things with my photos, and others are just cool ways to navigate Flickr's immense collection of images. In fact, for the last six months, my Safari homepage is a Random Photo Browser that delivers me a page of fresh photos every time I open Safari.

If you're new to Flickr or want to get more out of it, Flickr Hacks covers just about everything there is know about storing, sorting, and sharing your photos as a Flickr member. What has taken me months to learn and collect in my Flickr bookmark folder, you can learn in about a weekend. One of the appeals of O'Reilly's series of hack books is that they give you the tools to expand and deepen your experience and use of popular sites like Amazon, Ebay, and Google.

For those new to Flickr, Flickr Hacks introduces you to the basics of setting up an account, uploading your photos to the site, sharing your images, tagging them, joining Flickr pools, and building your own Flickr screensaver and random desktop backgrounds.

The book explains several ways to upload your photos to your Flickr homepage. You can do it through the site itself, you can download a batch loader or your can use two of my favorite apps developed by Fraser Speirs of Connected Flow. He's built a plug-in uploader for iPhoto and has just released, probably as this book was going to to press, an a Tiger Automator action that enables you to upload a selected image file directly to your Flickr homepage. With this action, you don't have to open an application, fill in a box, or even convert the size of your selected image. Just control click and upload. Simple, easy, and fast.

For us advance Flickr members, Flickr Hacks reveals what is called the API underpinnings of the site. According to the authors, API is an "incredible application program interface (API), which lets you interact with Flickr in unique and powerful ways." Pages and pages of various codes and command line language might scare off many potential readers of this book. Even a title with the word "hacks" might either excite the loins of young emerging computer programers or make novice computer users scared they're doing something illegal. But the latter is not the case. If you carefully read the instructions for the 50 different hacks explained in this book, you can possibly have more fun and save more time navigating Flickr itself.

Of course, the book gives a link to a ZIP archive file of all the individual codes and scripts discussed in the book already saved as text files. As of this writing, the webpage for this link is not posted, but I'm sure that will be remedied very soon.

Some of the more advanced hacks in this books don't seem worth the trouble for me personally, but many others I plan to give a try. I would like for example to customize my Flickr badge for my blog site, create contact sheets of my favorite Flickr photos, capture all the comments I've made on the photos of other Flickr members. The advance hacks explained in this book are not essential to exploring the site, but if you're interested in learning more about the underpinnings of web programming, learning how to run these programmatic hacks on OS X's Terminal (Unix) command line or as CGI or PHP scripts on your web site or server, it wouldn't be a waste of time.

There are other advanced hacks about building a Flickr Color picker, modifying the metadata of your posted photos, tracking the favorite photos of your Flickr contacts, using Google Map to locate other Flickr members, or finding which Flickr members might be listed in your Address Book.

Many hacks in the book are crossed referenced so that after you've signed up as a Flickr member, you can basically start with any hack you like. Some hacks are merely just links to fun things you can do with your and other Flickr member's photos. For example, Hack #46 references FD's Flickr Toys which is a great collection of online apps that will convert your Flickr images into calendar pages, posters, mock magazine covers, slide shows, and much more. Numerous Flickr pools have been created to showcase cool photo projects based on these fun online tools.


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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great!, But you don't need the book...., December 5, 2007

By	V. hotho "blatantimage" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Granted, the book is pretty good. But why? All the information is readily available in the Flickr help, Flickr forums, or just performing a google search. Not to mention, by the time the book arrives, there will be newer methods/ techniques. I love Flickr, but the point is having your 'visuals' online- information on Flickr is more dynamic online too.