Learning Social Media Analytics with R

Accessing Flickr's data

Now that we have a brief overview of Flickr, let's get started with our ritual of getting access to a platform's data. Pretty much as we have already seen across different social networks, Flickr exposes its data through a set of APIs for which we would need to create an app. For the use cases to be discussed further in this chapter, we will be relying on the latest API endpoints exposed by Flickr through direct calls, instead of R packages to do so. Flickr datasets, similar to StackExchange data dumps, though not official in certain cases, are also available on the Internet but are beyond the scope of this chapter.

Flickr exposes its data through APIs which accept and respond in formats such as JSON, XML, SOAP, and so on. ...