Sebastopol, CA--It's no wonder Flickr.com has two-million-plus registered users. It's the most creative, fun, and easy way to store and organize photos and show them off to the world--or safely share them with just a select few. And Flickr Hacks (Bausch and Bumgardner, O'Reilly, US $24.99) is the new, must-have collection of clever tricks, tips, and tools for anyone who wants to push the limits of what's possible with Flickr.
Flickr is about as hack-friendly as they come. In fact, "Flickr collaboratively hacked its way into existence," admits Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr, in her foreword to Flickr Hacks. She and her husband Stewart laid the foundation for Flickr, but they credit the creative and unexpected ways Flickr fans have used and extended Flickr for making it what it is today. "We hoped that people would build things that we didn't have the time or resources to build, and they did. We also hoped that they would build things that we hadn't thought of--and they definitely did that too."
Inspired by hacker ingenuity and resourcefulness and written for Flickr users at all levels, Flickr Hacks goes well beyond the basics of storing, sorting, and sharing photos online. It's for the beginner looking to manage metadata and play with tags or the technically savvy programmer in need of a detailed reference of Flickr API methods (Flickr's open API allows outside developers to code features for Flickr). There are hacks for:
- Posting photos to a blog directly from a camera phone (as many London-based Flickr subscribers did during the subway bombings in 2005)
- Using one's own photos or collaborating with strangers in the Flickr community to make mosaics, collages, sliding puzzles, slideshows, and ransom notes
- Setting random desktop backgrounds and creating custom Flickr screensavers
- Geotagging photos and mapping contacts
- Building a color picker with a dynamic color wheel of Flickr photos
- Feeding photos to a web site and subscribing to custom Flickr feeds using RSS
- Talking to the Flickr API using a web browser, Perl, or PHP
Additional Resources:
Flickr Hacks
Paul Bausch and Jim Bumgardner
ISBN: 0-596-10245-3, 368 pages, $24.99 US
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