14 DAY TRIAL // Flickr is expanding the use of its 'subscribe' API, which enables developers to get feeds with Flickr photos based on criteria they choose, by making it real-time and adding a much wider set of photos developers can pull.
"Initially you could only subscribe to photos from your contacts and favorites from your contacts," Flickr explained in a blog post. The post also contains the more technical details needed to use the API.
"Which was pretty neat, but that barely scratches the surface of stuff that happens on Flickr that people might be interested in. So we added some more stuff to subscribe to," the post on the Flickr developers blog read.
There are three new types of photos that can be pushed, by Flickr, to apps using the API. For example, developers can start receiving any photo from a location or area, via the 'geo' tag.
"With the geo topic type you can subscribe to photos from a particular area, specified as either a set of WOE IDs (also, here), a set of Flickr Place IDs, or by a point and a radius," Flickr explained.
There's a lot of flexibility in the way a place is defined, so you should be able to get exactly the photos you want, provided, of course, they are geo-tagged in the first place.
Another way of receiving specific photos is with tags. Developers can now specify a number of tags they can track and the feed will retrieve any of the photos that contains at least one of the tags.
Finally, developers can get photos from the Flickr Commons straight to their apps. They can even specify the Commons institutions, to get photos only from that source, but they can get all new photos added to the Commons as well.
"Set the topic type to commons, and set the nsids argument to a comma-separated list of NSIDs of Commons institutions you’re interested in (get them by calling flickr.push.getInstitutions) or just leave nsids empty to get all uploads and updates from the Commons," Flickr explained.