Flickrie

NOTICE: This gem is deprecated. You should switch to the flickr-objects gem.

This gem is a nice wrapper for the Flickr API with an object-oriented interface.

Supported Ruby versions:

  • 1.9.2
  • 1.9.3

This gem follows Semantic versioning.

Installation and setup

Add it to your Gemfile.

gem "flickrie"

And in your Terminal run bundle install.

Now you have to set your API key and shared secret in your app (if you don't have them yet, you can get them here).

require 'flickrie'

Flickrie.api_key = "API_KEY"
Flickrie.shared_secret = "SHARED_SECRET"

If you're in a Rails app, this would go into an initializer.

Usage

set_id = 819234
photos = Flickrie.photos_from_set(set_id) # => [#<Photo: id="8232348", ...>, #<Photo: id="8194318", ...>, ...]

photo = photos.first
photo.id          # => "8232348"
photo.url         # => "http://www.flickr.com/photos/67313352@N04/8232348"
photo.title       # => "Samantha and me"
photo.owner       # => #<User: nsid="67313352@N04", ...>
photo.owner.nsid  # => "67313352@N04"

You can also pass in additional parameters to to get more information about photos:

photos = Flickrie.photos_from_set(819234, extras: "owner_name,last_update,tags,views")

photo = photos.first
photo.tags.join(" ") # => "cave cold forrest"
photo.owner.username # => "jsmith"
photo.updated_at     # => 2012-04-20 23:29:17 +0200
photo.views_count    # => 24

For the list of all Flickr API methods and parameters you can pass to them take a look at the Flickr API documentation. The method names in this gem correspond to Flickr's method names (so, for example, Flickr.photos_from_set is actually flickr.photosets.getPhotos).

You can also get additional info on a single photo:

photo = Flickrie.get_photo_info(8232348)

photo.description           # => "In this photo, Samantha and me found a secret tunnel..."
photo.comments_count        # => 6
photo.visibility.public?    # => true
photo.can_download?         # => true
photo.owner.real_name       # => "John Smith"
photo.location.country.name # => "United States"

If you already have an instatiated photo, you can also get info like this:

photo.description # => nil
photo.get_info
photo.description # => "In this photo Peter said something really funny..."

You'll also probably want to display these photos in your app. There are some neat methods to help you with this.

photo = Flickrie.get_photo_sizes(8232348)
# or `photo.get_sizes` on an existing photo

photo.medium!(500)
photo.size       # => "Medium 500"
photo.source_url # => "http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7090/7093101501_9337f28800.jpg"
photo.width      # => 375
photo.height     # => 500

photo.available_sizes # => ["Square 75", "Thumbnail", "Square 150", "Small 240", "Small 320", "Medium 500"]

So, in your ERB template you could do something like this (in Rails):

<%= image_tag photo.source_url, :size => "#{photo.width}x#{photo.height}" %>

You can see the full list of available methods and attributes in the documentation.

Also, be sure to check the wiki for some additional info and tips.

Authentication

require 'flickrie'

Flickrie.api_key = "API_KEY"
Flickrie.shared_secret = "SHARED_SECRET"

request_token = Flickrie::OAuth.get_request_token
url = request_token.authorize_url
puts "Visit this url to authenticate: #{url}"

print "If you agreed, the code was displayed afterwards. Enter it: "
code = gets.strip
access_token = request_token.get_access_token(code)
puts "You successfully authenticated!"

Flickrie.access_token = access_token.token
Flickrie.access_secret = access_token.secret
access_token.user_params # => {fullname: "John Smith", user_nsid: "67131352@N03", username: "jsmith"}

When getting the authorization url, you can also call

request_token.authorize_url(permissions: "read")

to ask only for "read" permissions. Available permissions are "read", "write" and "delete".

If you want to make authentication in your web application, I would highly recommend the omniauth-flickr gem. Or, if you want to do it from scratch, without any additional gems, check out this wiki for an example how that authentication might look like.

Photo upload

photo_id = Flickrie.upload("/path/to/photo.jpg", title: "A cow")
photo = Flickrie.get_photo_info(photo_id)
photo.title # => "A cow"

For the list of parameters you can pass in when uploading a photo, see this page.

Note that photo uploads require authentication with "write" permissions.

See this wiki for an example of an asynchronous photo upload.

A few words

Now, there are a lot more API methods that I didn't cover yet, but I'll constantly update this gem with new API methods. For all of the methods I didn't cover, you can still call them using

Flickrie.client.get(method_name, params = {})
Flickrie.client.post(method_name, params = {})

For example:

response = Flickrie.client.get "flickr.photos.getContext", :photo_id => 2842732

reponse.body # =>
# {
#   "count" => {"_content" => 99},
#   "prevphoto" => {
#     "id" => "6946978706",
#     "secret" => "b38270bbd6",
#     ...
#   }
#   "nextphoto" => {
#     "id" => "6946979704",
#     "secret" => "74513ff732",
#     ...
#   }
# }
response.body['prevphoto']['id'] # => "6946978706"

It's not nearly as pretty, but at least you can get to the data for the time being. Notice that the :api_key parameter is always passed in by default.

Credits

Special thanks to @mislav, my brother, he helped me really a lot with getting started with Ruby, and with the basis of this gem.

Changelog

You can see the changelog here.

Social

You can follow me on Twitter, I'm @jankomarohnic.

License

MIT