3kbo

I have users with photos published on photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Fotopic, ImageShack, Livejournal, Photobucket, Picasaweb, SmugMug, Webshots and others.

What I want to do is provide these users with the ability to link these published photos to projects managed by our web application. Within our application only the published URL to the image would be stored.

The Flickr API, with its support for REST, is the ideal site to use as a proof of concept. At least one other site, 23 also implements the Flickr API, making it easy to support both 23 and Flickr.

The Ajax based Flickr Related Tag Browser provides a good example of how to use the Flickr API to browse and select photos by tag. Within our application a user wold browse their Flickr account and search by photo album, tag or date to retrieve specific photos which would illustrate the project site itself, tasks to be accomplished, problems associated with a task or as visual confirmation that a task had been completed.

As an example I have two projects that I am about to start.

• The first is to widen a driveway, add a front gate and landscape the front garden to link in with the new driveway and gate.
• The second is to complete the garage at the back of the property, which includes adding a couple of rooms that will link up with the existing studio kitchen and main room.

The photos for these two different projects I have tagged gate and garage respectively on my Flickr account.

The default Flickr web pages that open for

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/richard3kbo/tags/gate/ and
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/richard3kbo/tags/garage/

by themselves give good overviews of the two different project sites.

Linking specific photos to project tasks helps illustrate and clarify these tasks.

Using photos published on Flickr and similar sites allows our users to continue using the photo sharing sites they are used to and which have more features for image processing and sharing than our site.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 6:18 am and is filed under Flickr, Geo, RESTful, Rails, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.