Photo by cackhanded

If you’re not already familiar with machine tags the easiest way to think of them is being like a plain old tag but with a special syntax that allows users to define additional structured data about that tag. In turn the magic space hamsters that run the site have been trained to recognize, index and allow for searches across multiple facets of a given machine tag.

Machine tags have three parts : a namespace which is like a subject or a topic; a predicate which is a like a property of that topic; a value which is … well, a value.

For a more thorough introduction to the subject I’d recommend reading the announcement
we made in the Flickr API discussion group when machine tags were first added to the site. If you’d like to know even more, after that, there is good collection of links available on del.icio.us.

Which brings us to the part where I tell you that we’ve added the ability to search for machine tagged photos in plain old tag URLs (as well as in tag searches on the Flickr search page) using the facetted query syntax that has always been available in the API. For example :

• All the photos tagged “flickr:user=bees”, aka Cal :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flickr:user=bees

That’s a trick, really. You’ve always been able to do this since machine tags are just
tags. The New-New means you can be even more granular in what you are looking
for. How about :

• All photos with Flickr users :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flickr:user=

• Or Upcoming.org users :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/upcoming:user=

• Or even Facebook users :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/facebook:user=

• Or simply all users regardless of service (or namespace) :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/*:user=

• Maybe, all the photos in the flickr namespace :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flickr:*=

• But, seriously, back to Cal : Cal, across services (or namespaces) :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/*:user=bees

• All Cal. All the time :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/*:*=bees

• And no, you can not do this. No ponies for you if you try :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/*:*=

The wildcard URL syntax is also available for an individual user’s tags :

• These are all my photos that have been machine tagged with either a Geonames, Places or GeoPlanet (née Where on Earth) locality ID :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/tags/*:locality=

• Or photos in the George Eastman House’s photostream that were developed using the daguerrotype process :

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/george_eastman_house/tags/photo:process=daguerreotype

Now for the list of caveats and Known-Knowns :

• At the moment it is still not possible to poke around the hierarchy of a given machine tag : all the predicates for a namespace; all the unique pairs of namespace and predicates; that sort of thing. It is On The List ™ and hopefully we can offer up something for you to play with, even if it’s just in the API to start with, shortly.

• Values in wildcard URLs should are treated the same way regular tags are in URLs. That is “san francisco” becomes “sanfrancisco” or in machine tag speak : *:*=sanfrancisco.

• In the examples above, I’ve illustrated namespaces that are used to denote one service or another. It is important to remember that there are no rules about what can or should be a namespace. Like tagging, the hope is that the various communities will arrive at and adapt a consensus according to their needs.



Photo by straup

In the meantime, kick back and enjoy photos taken by people on their Dopplr trips, photos by people who really really like airplanes or photos by people who are interested in possums
(not to mention all manner of marsupials) or whatever else comes to mind!

Back for more, my wee little tin miners? As we say ’round these parts, Onwards!

But first thanks to Rafe, and Stephen for playing along.

Myles, POWER USER!
Testing on dev is for the unconfident.

Macbook Pro, Textmate, scp, Firefox, Firebug, ack, Quicksilver, iTerm, vi, Mail.app.

Norby, Ops Succubus
Sleep! What is it with you people and sleep?

• Y!-issue MBP (upgraded to Leopard w/ spaces)
• Terminal, ssh, Safari, Firefox, Nagios, vi
• tunnels >> VPN, have more than one RSA key if you work remotely :)

Paul L, Roaming (not Roman) Yeti
Gngghhhghghhh

MacBook Pro, JDK 1.6, IntelliJ Idea 7.03, iTerm, one reliable crazy Canadian-Russian.

Schill, Lil’ Javascript charmer
[ This space left intentionally blank ]

MBP, TextMate, A-grade (Fx/Safari/Opera) browsers, IE 6/7/8 + MS Script debugger via Parallels. GIMP for the odd image edit. Dell 24″.

Fun stuff: Beyerdynamic DT-880 headphones, iTunes + last.fm + SOMA FM for muzak. Finger rocket defense system. Grande dark roast in the AM.

Serguei, Ex-KGB Field Agent
Comments are lying, code tells the truth!

PC laptop. JDK 1.6, IntelliJ Idea 7.03, FAR manager, SecureCRT ssh client. kill, especially in its most radical form kill -9. And tail -f , I can watch logs for hours, it’s better than TV.

Simon, Totally bi(linguisticalated)
Um, no, that won’t work in French

• MBP
• Textmate
• Firefox 3
• Safari
• Parallels (for testing in IE)
• Apple Terminal
• Apple Mail
• Quicksilver

grep, vi, perl, dozens of bash shortcuts. and my personal favourite for code review : “cvs diff | mate”

The reborn-phoenix-like-from-the-ashes WebMonkey has a tutorial up on Getting Started with the Flickr API using the Python API library.

Covers fetching favorites (an under mashedup feature if there ever was one), and plotting geotagged photos on Google Maps.

We were impressed with Michael Ogawa’s code_swarm project, so were understandably excited when he made the source available (under the GPL v3). We sprang into action, avoiding the real work we were supposed to be doing and created some visualizations of the main Flickr subversion repository.

In this visualization, blue represents PHP, green is HTML, red is Java, purple is CSS and JavaScript, Cyan is Flash and ActionScript, with yellow filling in for everything else.

Myles took it a step further, using the tool to visualize our internal bug tracking system. In this movie, each node represents an issue, flashing red as it was opened, orange as it was assigned, blue as we argued about what to do and final green when it was resolved.

This required a little modification of the software to allow for states on nodes, so that the node color can change as the state changes. Myles has also been working on some modifications to improve upon the abrupt endings. New movies might get posted here if they’re awesome enough.

We’re hard at work (well, sort-of-work) thinking up new things to visualize and new ways to present the data. If you have some bright ideas, why not post them in the code forum.

We busy little nerds of Flickr may act and smell like a bunch of psychotic monkey-bots, but beneath our filth-drenched metal exteriors beat the fleshy hearts of a thousand delicate human flowers. We feel, we love.

Ever wondered what keeps us well-oiled? I did, so I asked people, “What do you use to get the job done?”

And this, my dubious friends, is how we (rick)roll.

Aaron, Ce sera mauvais français parce que j’ai utilisé l’Internet
You’re still wrong

• Emacs (dired-mode and shell-mode and M-x goto-line)
• Glimpse (and alias grep grep -n -r -e)
• Tabs and virtual workspaces

Cal, Baconmeister
Fuck off and die

• shitty pc laptop w/ xp pro
• twin 20″ monitors
• noted
• explorer
• ff & thunderbird
• putty / pageant / plink
• winscp
• cygwin
• msys & mingw
• wireshark
• paint shop pro 5
• miranda
• calc & chamap
• tortoise cvs/svn
• beyond compare
• apache/mysql/php
• ms office w/ visio
• itunes

Dan, The Rev.
I don’t do quotes

2 Machine setup;

MacBook Pro for writing code, TextWrangler (off-white Lucida Grande 11pt font on blue background, for reduced eye-strain), Safari & Opera for (final) testing.

PC for testing, with IE6,7,blah + MS Script debugger. Most testing takes place in Firefox + Firebug (cannot live without firebug). Monitor rotated 90 degrees to give Firebug more real estate for hacking around the dom, editing js script on the fly, etc.

Extras:

• Headphones
• Pink noise generator (volume set to one notch down from default) to drown out background noise.
• Ocean Waves generator to take the edge off the pink noise.
• last.fm radio tag search “ambient” to take the edge off the pink noise and ocean waves.
• Quicksilver, to get stuff done quickly.
• Visor for quick terminal access.
• WriteRoom, for taking notes (again off-white text on a blue background).

Dunstan, He’s like, got a dog and stuff
Mistakenly included on the engineering mailing list for 505 days and counting

• Macbook Pro
• Textmate
• Photoshop
• Transmit
• Safari
• Firefox+Firebug
• IE (in Parallels)
• Quicksilver

Eric, Teenage Mutant Ninja Scripta
Please, just work

Powerbook, BBEdit, Perl scripts to manage scp+cvs+Flex+compression, Firefox w/ Firebug and Webdev toolbar, Flex 3 SDK, Terminal, nano, Parallels.

Kellan, Rebellious off-worlder
I’d rather be building cloud castles

MBP, a hot-rodded version of Textmate, QuickSilver+Terminal.app (what’s the Finder?), Thunderbird + keyconfig for threading and archiving, SSHKeychain, grep, awk, tree, QuickProxy for Firefox (2.x), Wordpress.com, last.fm, Pandora, and Adium. used to use PHPfi, but less lately.

Murphy, Secret ops mole
… –force –yes –quiet > /dev/null 2>&1

• MacBook Pro
• iTerm
• vim, kill, screen, awk, rsync, mtr, nmap, strace, gdb
• Wireshark
• SSH Agent
• Thunderbird + Enigmail
• Firefox + Firebug + SwitchProxy + Nagios Checker
• Adium
• Caffeine
• Home Zone

Coming soon: more responses!

You can grab the slides as a PDF from my Web 2.0 Expo talk Capacity Planning for Web Operations, or flip through them below.

| View | Upload your own

Once upon a time, webheads used to talk about “conference season”, but it seems that these days there’s always a conference running somewhere. Having dispensed with Web 2.0, we’re now turning our attention to XTech 2008, which takes place in Dublin, Ireland from Tuesday May 6th to Friday May 9th.

The Flickr team has two talks lined up for those attending XTech. Through a freak scheduling accident they’re back-to-back, giving attendees the exciting opportunity to experience one and a half straight hours of pure Flickr-related goodness:

• 11:00am, Thu May 8th, Goldsmiths 1, Kellan Elliott-McCrea talks about Advanced OAuth Wrangling
• 11:45am, Thu May 8th, Goldsmiths 2, Simon Batistoni (that’s me…) presents “Ni Hao, Monde: Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries”

Hopefully we’ll see some of you there!

Looking backwards for a moment, this is also a chance to re-post the slides from my previous internationalization-themed talk, “Taking Over the World, The Flickr Way” which I gave at South by Southwest in March. This hour-long session was a high-level overview of some of the challenges and solutions we stumbled upon during the internationalization and localization of Flickr.com which we undertook in the first half of 2007:

Versions of the slides in other formats (keynote, swf, pdf) are available here.

As for Web 2.0 Expo, some of the team’s presentations should be showing up here in the next week or so, starting with slides from the delectable John Allspaw.

It isn’t just you, the pictures really did start moving, some of them at least. Which is an attempt at humor to cover the fact that this post is very belated.

Presumably you’ve noticed that folks are uploading videos to Flickr, and you’re wondering how to work with video in the API? I’ll try to recap, and expand upon the info in this thread in the API group.

Long Photos

First thing to understand is as far as Flickr is concerned videos are just a funny type of photo. Your API application can ignore that video exists and everything should go on working. This means:

• you can display a preview of a video by treating it exactly like any other photo on Flickr.
• photos AND videos are returned by any method which used to return just photos
• you can get info about a video like you would a photo.

Videos, photos, and “media”

If you’re calling one of the dozens of API methods including flickr.photos.search() and … that return what we call a “standard photo response” then that API method takes an “extras” argument. extras is a comma separated list of additional metadata you would like included in the API response.

With the launch of video we’ve added a new extra: “media”. Included media in your list of requested extras and we’ll include a new attribute media=photo or media=video with each photo element. Like so:

<photo id="2345938910" owner="35468159852@N01" secret="846d9c1be9" server="1423" farm="2" title="Naughty Dandelion" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" media="video"/>

Additionally if you’re calling flickr.photos.search() you can filter your results by media type by passing `media=photos` or `media=videos` as an additional search argument. (not to be confused with the extras of the same name)

Default is “media=both” returning both photos and videos.

Displaying videos: just funny photos

For each uploaded video we generate a JPG preview in a range of sizes. Identical to what we do for photos.

Read the documentation for flickr.photos.getSizes() to get you started on how to display Flickr photos.

Playing videos: constructing the embed code

We don’t currently provide a way to get to the FLV for a video. (the Flash encoded video file) We’re looking into making this possible. In the mean time if you want to display watch-able videos you’ll need to embed our video player.

In addition to the photo height and width of the preview images, videos also have a stream height and stream width which we set when we process videos during upload. While you can make the video player any size you want the videos are going to look much better if displayed at the proper size.

You can get the stream height and stream width and the URL for the video player using the standard flickr.photos.getSizes() method:

<sizes canblog="1" canprint="1" candownload="1">
<size label="Square" width="75" height="75" source="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1423/2345938910_846d9c1be9_s.jpg" url="http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/2345938910/sizes/sq/" media="photo"/>
... standard getSizes stuff ...
<size label="Video Player" width="500" height="375" source="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=49235&photo_id=2345938910&photo_secret=846d9c1be9" url="http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/2345938910/" media="video"/>
</sizes>

Alternately the stream width and height are included in the new video element returned by flickr.photos.getInfo()
:

...
<video ready="1" failed="0" pending="0" duration="14" width="500" height="375" />
</photo>
....

Generating Embed Code

The player takes a height, a width, a photo id, a photo secret (required for playing non-public videos), and the argument flickr_show_info_box, which when set to layers over top of the video videographer, and video title info when the video isn’t playing.

I’m not going to go over in depth the markup for the player, but here is a quick and dirty PHP function for generating it:

#
# takes a "Video Player" source from flickr.photos.getSizes() and optional display arguments
#

function flickr_video_embed($video_url, $width="400", $height="300", $info_box="true") {

    $markup = <<<EOD
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="$width" height="$height" data="$video_url"  classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"> <param name="flashvars" value="flickr_show_info_box=$info_box"></param> <param name="movie" value="$video_url"></param><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="$video_url" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="flickr_show_info_box=$info_box" height="$height" width="$width"></embed></object>
EOD;
    return $markup;

}

Videos in the feeds

Videos, unsurprisingly, are included in all of the various RSS and Atom feeds which contain photos. For each video entry we include a MediaRSS content element that points to the SWF player, and has a content type of “application/x-shockwave-flash”. Additional we include the stream height and width as the height and width elements in the content element.

In RSS 2.0 feed we also include an enclosure element.

Uploading Videos

Upload videos just like you would a photo. We’ll do the magic to figure out whether the uploaded file is a video or a photo. You’ll generally want to use the asynchronous upload methods as videos tend to be larger, and take more time to upload.

Videos need to be “transcoded” — turned into an FLV which is playable on the Web. As this takes time videos aren’t always immediately available for viewing. You can check the processing status of a video using flickr.photos.getInfo(), and examining the video element.

<video ready="1" failed="0" pending="0" duration="14" width="0" height="0"/>

ready is watchable, pending is still being transcoded, and failed videos need to be re-uploaded. (possibly in a different format)

More Questions?

We’ve got an open thread in the Flickr API group discussing video.

Last night twitter released their next batch of API improvements, of course the one that caught my eye was …

“[NEW] /account/update_location.[xml|json] - sets the location for the
authenticated user to the string passed in a “location” parameter.
Nothing fancy, no geocoding or normalization. Just putting this out
there so developers can start playing with how geolocation might fit
into their Twitter applications.”

… which is nice as it’s just thrown in there as a ‘what if’ type of thing. There’s no direct reason for twitter to have location stuff, (well no more than Flickr I guess) but everyone knows that everyone wants it.

It’d be great if you didn’t have to update twitter yourself and there was something else out there that could do it for us.

Read the rest of “Twitter API updates, FireEagle and new Flickr API fun” for more on Twitter’s location API, FireEagle, and Flickr’s not-a-geocoder.

First, there was filtr but that’s another story entirely. The point being that I gave up carrying around a capital-C camera a few years ago choosing instead to make do with cameraphones and the availability of cheap, unlimited data-plans in the U.S.

I am mostly lazy and can’t really be bothered to shuttle photos around from one device to another only to move them again to the giant device in the sky called Flickr. Before filtr I relied on the upload by email feature to snag a photo and quickly share it with the future-past but the desire to touch up — or filter — the photos before upload meant that I needed to write my own service to accept, process and then upload pictures to Flickr using the API.

Which is what I want to talk about. Sort of.

Read the rest of “FireDopplGängEaglr” for thoughts on FireEagle, Dopplr, place, and the DWIM engine.