Conveyor belt slideshow using flickr

[backyarder1]

1) Script Title: Conveyor Belt slideshow script

2) Script URL (on DD): http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamici...rightslide.htm

3) Describe problem: this isn't a problem. just wondered if some guru out here might be able to tell me how to do what I want.

I would like to take the photos from a specific tag in flickr and display them in conveyor belt fashion, such as the conveyor belt slideshow script does. Any ideas?

[djr33]

Javascript can't search a remote site (due to cross-domain security issues), so you'd need a serverside language like PHP to help with this. But that would be very complex unless flickr wants you to do this-- if not, you'd need to actually run the search and then parse the HTML of the search page every time using PHP. That's not an easy job to say the least and at worst might be blocked for abusing flickr (either for breaking their TOS or just making too many requests from one location-- your server).

This is technically possible, but the only realistic way to do it would be to use an API if flickr has one available. I don't know.

The other option would be, of course, to either save the images yourself (assuming you have the rights to do so) or copy the URLs to the images (again, you'd want the rights to do that).


One potential problem regardless of your method (unless you copy the images to your server) would be hotlinking-- if you are requesting images from flickr but not from a page on their site, they might block the requests. That's fairly common, especially for image hosts.


To be direct about it, I'd suggest looking for an API and trying to use that; if they don't have one or it won't work, you should probably give up because even if you get it to work, they'll likely block you if they ever find out-- they could have an API if they wanted to.

[backyarder1]

Thanks so much for the very thorough answer. You had me at "complex".

Flickr does allow a slideshow of their pics so I will just use that.

Have a wonderful new year!

[djr33]

As I said, if they have an API designed for this sort of thing, that's not going to be hard. It's only complex if you have to design it yourself. But basically whatever they give you is going to be best, so the slideshow they have is what you'll probably end up using (unless they have other similar options).