Flickr API – photo portfolio

By Jeff Howard on January 2011

For day one I figured I’d get started on two things I’ve been wanting to spend more time on. One being to spend more time with the Flickr API. The other to start work on building a photography portfolio. I figured I wasn’t really into the idea of a polished professional looking portfolio with just a select number of photos. Instead I wanted something a bit more dynamic and unusual. There comes in the Flickr API. What I particularly like about using Flickr is that I don’t have to worry about updating the portfolio, I can just update Flickr and the changes will take effect (especially nice with all the iPhone camera apps that have Flickr integration these days).

The initial plan was just to get something up and running and start implementing and thinking up new things to add as the day went on. I’ve been looking at this as a project that will be bigger than a day’s work but figured a strong start will make me more likely to get it done. He’s where I’ve got so far …

I setup phpFlickr to make the use of the Flickr API a little easier. I then started pulling in images and formatting them into a grid. Next was implementing Lightbox for viewing the larger images. From there I brought in a nav and created some other example API calls to pull images in a few different ways. Here is what it looks like now …

( click the image to take you to the site )

As far as next steps go, I’ve still got plenty of work ahead of me. Need to get my Flickr account up to date with the backlog of photos I’ve been meaning to edit. I’ve been working on that over the past week though, so I’ll be getting them uploaded over the next few days. Once I’ve got that done I need to do some reorganizing and restructure the nav to make some calls that make a bit more sense for a photography portfolio. I also want to integrate some more interesting calls in there too. I’d like to tap into other APIs so that I can do things like pull images that have tags or geolocation data associated with my Foursquare or Twitter updates. Again, I like the idea of finding ways to add a twist that I don’t have to actively be logging in to update. So I’ll be exploring those ideas more. First off though, I’ll likely try to get some smaller more practical things out of the way. Things like adding a Flickr icon in the Lightbox descriptions that will allow users to click through the image’s Flickr page, adding pages to navigate to additional images in the grid, integrating AJAX so the pages don’t have to reload and adding a search field to the nav. But before any of that … on to day two!

January 18th, 2011