Gallery2 & the Flickr API (Some amazing possibilities!)
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gragland
Joined: 2005-03-07
Posts: 35 |
Posted: Tue, 2005-03-29 05:57
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It would be great if Gallery2 could load photos directly from a Flickr account. Its entirely possible for someone to implement this feature using the Flickr API: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ Thanks to flickr you would have unlimited (and very reliable) photo storage for the price of a Flickr Pro account. For those with many images or for people who want to backup all their hi res photos this would be much much cheaper then purchasing web hosting. Not too mention the possibility of having G2 read and utilize flickr data such as tags, sets, groups. Do any Gallery developers find a G2 Flickr storage module an interesting possibility? |
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Posts: 32509
Without taking a look at the Flickr API, how would the athentication for the viewers work?
G2 has an image firefall, images are not accessible without going through the G2 application/API. Would this feature be lost when using a flickr storage? Or how would a browser/client authenticate (via G2) to download the images from Flickr?
And if it is just for the storage, why Flickr? Any online storage would be equivalent, right? like google (gmail), or another webspace accessible via webserver/ftp/ssh/...
Posts: 35
I'm not sure how it would authenticate, maybe there would be more problems then i thought... Would it be a big deal if the image firefall feature was lost for images coming from flickr?
Why Flickr? I guess any online storage space could work. The attractive thing about Flickr is you have unlimited space and you can theoretically have G2 utilize Flickr tags and sets.
Posts: 32509
IMO these would be two things:
a) Flickr as a remote storage
b) Import of/Synchronize with Flickr (meta)data
I think having a part of your G2 including its metadata on a remote host would be extremely slow. Metadata is also very small. So having metadata local (synchronized/imported) and the storage on the remote host would work quite good.
We are also planning a G2 mirror (load balancing, remote storage, ...). It's kinda the same thing. The remote API would have been some sort of G2 and not Flickr. But I'm sure both could be done.
Posts: 974
I'm not sure that I understand the value of having flickr in your local gallery. Why not just manage all your images in flickr, if flickr is what you want? Yes, gallery could authenticate to flickr, get metadata from flickr, and provide links to flickr images, but then, um, why use gallery?
Posts: 32509
jmullan, as he explained, 'cause of the unlimited storage.
Posts: 974
But why gallery as a front end? How would it be worth it to manage flickr photos through the gallery interface? Would this be only for backup purposes? What information about the flickr data would be stored in gallery, and what would be stored in flickr? If data was duplicated, which would be the authoritative source? Would some images be local to the gallery and some remote on flickr? Would gallery merely be a layout engine for the flickr data?
Posts: 32509
Flickr would merely be a remote storage for G2. G2 is more powerful, more customizable. Additionally, Flickr data could be imported.
Posts: 35
Yeah, exactly. I prefer G2 over flickr because it has a lot of great features that flickr does not. I also like the layout of G2 and its customizability. I am not so much interested in G2 using flickr meta data, as I am using flickr for cheap photo storage.
One question I have is, doesn't G2 normally put photos in album folders on the webspace? How would it work to store the photos remotely on flickr, but sill be able to organize them into albums using G2? Could you just have an xml file that designated what photos were in what album?
It would be great to be able to upload photos to your flickr account through the gallery2 java upload applet (which I know is possible because people have made flickr upload programs), that way you wouldn't need to mess with flickr at all, just give the java applet your flickr account login info and control everything through G2.
Posts: 3236
Sounds like a neat idea, but my vote would be for "normal" webhost space to be implemented first. There are probably far more people with access to a web space with lots of space than those with flickr accounts.
I've never really seen flickr, but is its interface so bad that you would want to use G2 as an interface to flickr? Or is it just the gobs of space really?
Posts: 35
Lots of space. You could host photos for multiple galleries (friends and family) under the same flickr account. No web hosting plan would be cheaper then that.
Posts: 32
Would be gorgeous!!!!
But is it fast to download from?
Could be faster than an average webserver?
Posts: 32509
why should it be faster than the average webserver?
IMO fryfrog is right. if it's just 'cause of the remote storage, then a generic remote storage module has priority. but there are other problems, i.e. what requirements will we have for the remote server. php, even a db? we have discussed this a while ago and had some conclusions.
see:
http://gallery.menalto.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=1456&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0#56381
Posts: 35
How hard do you think it would be to make a flickr storage module? Would it be possible to do it without making big changes to G2. For instance could you make it so that when G2 tries to load a photo from wherever it normally loads the photos from, an .htaccess file or php script redirects it to a photo on flickr instead.
I don't know much about programming or how G2 works, so maybe what im saying is rediculous...
Posts: 7934
Because G2 controls all access to the filesystem via our own platform abstraction, this is actually possible without a huge change. However, without some tweaks to the core module it's not possible to do it as a module right now. We've thought ahead about doing something like this, though and it's on the table.
Realistically, unless a new developer steps up and starts working on this it's not going to happen in the near future.
Posts: 2
Hello,
Does anyone have method that can import flickr pics to gallery2?
Thanks
Posts: 1
Just thought i'd resurrect this thread.
With a few suggestions:
1. Images sit of flickr
2. No changes are made on images marked as "flickr"
3. Use the flickr API to create a sync list of
"albums" --> "images" --> ("url","tags","comments", etc)
4. Comments posted to these images will be posted back to flickr using the API[*]
All managment of the photos will be done using Flickr's own front-end but (as someone mentioned earlier) G2 will act like a front end for flickr
For authetication purposes, the images will be displayed using a login that will be provided during setup but all comments will be treated as anonymous unless the user signs in.
[*] If for security purposes users would rather not put their flickr login details on someone else's site. They can be presented with the flickr page for the item they want to comment on...
or
Post all comments as anonymous (assuming flcikr allows anonymous commenting)
Posts: 9
Man, I would LOVE this feature. I have a webhost with 1.8GB and it's almost all full of family photos. I'd really like to be able to move all of my files to flickr and use menalto gallery 2 as the front end (with a customized template of course). Anyone have an idea if there is any movment on this front?
Posts: 8
This would be a great feature - but I'm more interested in the ability to display and rank keywords. More importantly I think a module to allow visitors to post keywords to your collection items would be extremely hot thing. Along with the ability to add keywords a validation and ranking algorithm to display the most used, newest keywords that link back to the actual items would also be important.
Of course the ability to embed it in mambo/joomla would be important.
Is anyone developing this ? Anyone interested ?
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Posts: 1
In addition to this (or as part of it), does anyone have an easy way to migrate a Gallery images to Flickr, instead of doing them all manually (which could be a pain with 1000s of photos)?
Posts: 6
The way I was thinking Gallery could work with Flickr is for there to be a main gallery for the site administered by the site owner, but other trusted users could be allowed to link their flickr site to the gallery.
Gallery2 would show a thumbnail for the subfolder as normal (but taken from flickr) and inside that subfolder would be that person's flickr sets, it should be possible to almost make it look like they aren't stored remotely at all, though obviously as an acknowledgement to Flickr it would be good if clicking the photo opened the flickr page for that photo.
The advantage would be the amount of control the remote user would have over his photos with a very limited access to G2, while it would also solve bandwidth problems.
Posts: 40
Actually, I would just like to be able to automatically import Flickr galleries to my G2 gallery. Applications like ZoneTag make it interesting to use Flickr as my upload site (as it automatically tags my pictures with a location and will upload them while I am out). Once on my Flickr site, I really just want them transfered to my G2 gallery.
/carmi
Posts: 1
I'm definitely interested in this kind of integration too, and it seems like we have a few different use cases. Personally, I love flickr's speed (bandwidth) and the fact that it links you to huge communities. However, I don't know if I trust them enough to store all of my valuable photos; I want to back up all my images on another server (G2).
So far we have:
1) Flickr as Gallery image repository
2) G2 automatically mirrors (retrieves) images from flickr photostream
3) G2 automatically uploads images to flickr photostream
(did I miss anything?)
I think I'm most interested in the mirroring idea. I read the other thread about mirroring of two G2 instances. Anyway, if anyone's working on this already, I'd love to (attempt to) contribute.
Posts: 4
OK, old thread but the latest reply is only a week old so I don't feel too foolish to bump it like a noob. Anyway. I'm now hosting an online gallery for my church and a lot of the active artists in the church already have Flickr accounts (including my co-chair of the Arts committee - total Flickr addict). I'd like to be able to allow registered users to do their own linking to their flickr accounts without my having to do a lot of back-end stuff every time, and reserve the webspace for the gallery2 gallery for just church-specific files (images, maybe some short videos, and mp3s of the sermons). I don't really care about transfering pictures between Flickr & Gallery2 much at this point (that may change down the line!), but to enable the active artists to say "Hi! I'm here and here too!" would be nice, let them drum up some business for themselves and such. Is there any way to do this? Or am I stuck doing a "links" page?
Ahmie
Posts: 5
ANy further comment on this - it's something I'd love to happen. Have several sets on flickr which I'd like to be mirrored in gallery
It'll also be great if we have a section/set on gallery that when added to, will update flickr!
Posts: 40
I tried to throw the first stone: see this thread
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Posts: 1
I would like to have this too. Regards.
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