Flickr Hacks

Chapter 7. Custom Applications

Hacks 43-50

Many independent developers have taken photos beyond the Flickr web site and into completely new applications, thanks to the Flickr API. In the same spirit of sharing, they’ve made their custom Flickr apps available to anyone who wants to play with them.

Some of these Flickr toys can turn your photos into motivational posters [Hack #46] or puzzles [Hack #48] . With a bit of programming, you can also mash up Flickr photos into collages [Hack #43], ransom notes [Hack #47] , or complex photo mosaics [Hack #49] .

This chapter will show you what’s possible when you go beyond the Flickr API basics into the realm of more fully realized custom applications.

Mash Up Your Photos

ImageMagick is the ultimate tool for making collages.

This is the first in a series of hacks about creating mosaic images. In this hack, we’ll build an image that contains a number of other photographs, randomly positioned and rotated. In the course of doing this, we’ll learn a bit about the incredibly useful ImageMagick library (plus, we’ll make a pretty interesting-looking collage).

What You Need

To build a collage from Flickr images, you’ll need some Flickr images, of course. I like to work with 100 x 100 thumbnails (these are the ones with the _t extension) until I’m happy with the final result. Then, I download larger images for the final draft.

This hack relies on the getPhotoList.pl script [Hack #33] and the getSnaps.pl script [Hack #34] .

Finally, you’ll need ImageMagick ...