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Flickr to Grant Commercial API Key to Competitors
eobanb writes "The Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr has come under fire recently for the perceived 'lock-in' that their API creates. Flickr's terms of service state clearly that all photos uploaded to Flickr by users are owned by their respective users, yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting. Surprisingly, Flickr developer Stewart Butterfield posted in the thread on Flickr: "I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric's position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access." This means that users will soon be able to freely move data between different photo-sharing sites, like Zooomr (which has already implemented the Flickr API), Google PicasaWeb, 23hq, or Tabblo."
There are plenty of pre-made options at Hotscripts..
yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting.
Umm...
Right-click. "Save As".
For those images that use "protection", I recommed the wonderful "Nuke Anything" plugin for FireFox... Just right-click the image, "Remove this object" to get rid of the transparent image over it, then you can save it.
And yes, for the "didn't read the FP" Nazis, I realize that the API does not equal the actual webpage - I just consider the distinction irrelevant.
not having to abide by silly Terms & Conditions
Paid hosting has terms and conditions too, sometimes as strict as these photo sites.
Or just use http://flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html
"You can construct the source URL to a photo once you know its ID, server ID and secret, as returned by many API methods."
The point is to make it easy to transfer one's files from Flickr to a competitor (and vice versa).
A fairly major correction to the original post: "yet Flickr's API only allows uploading, not exporting". Flickr's API has *always* allowed exporting. As pointed out by Stewart on TechCrunch you can already buy a DVD backup of your Flickr photos complete with metadata, use one of several open source utilities built on Flickr's open API to download your photos to your local machine, or roll your own if you have the scripting skills. This is all pretty revolutionary, but they did it a few years ago.
What this does is to allow customers to switch easily between Flickr and/or its competitors. Let's say you have an account with Flickr and want to move to one of its competitors. The competitor would now have access to Flickr's API, so it could write a script which (with your permission, of course) downloads all of your Flickr photos and puts them into galleries in your account with the competitor. This would be easier for most customers than downloading all their files.
Because they require a reciprocal key from the competitor, this would also allow Flickr to build a script to move your images from the competitor to your new Flickr account.
Capiche?
This has long been a concern of Flickr users. I was one of them, so I wrote an application that will allow you to download your pictures back from Flickr. I know it doesn't solve the entire concern of moving your library, but it is a start. You can check it out here.
I agree. The pro memberships are a revenue stream along with the print services. The other opportunity here comes from the tagging. Through tagging, Flickr can know what the images are about. This enables contextual advertising beyond what images.google.com could ever hope for.
Because the non-pro memberships on Flickr limit users to 2 sets, users are encouraged to use tags to organize their own photos. So, Flickr has really created an incentive for users to perform data entry that Flickr can use to commercialize this content.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!