Review by Thomas Duff:

Flickr is one of those web sites that has gone in directions I don’t think anyone ever imagined it would go. What started out as simple photo-sharing is now a full-featured site with a programming API. Many of these are covered and explored in the book Flickr Hacks – Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online by Paul Bausch & Jim Bumgardner.

Contents: Sharing Photos; Tagging Photos; Viewing Photos; Community; Maintenance; API Basics; Custom Applications; Index

At the core, Flickr is a site to share pictures online with friends, family, or anyone else you open your pictures to. And pretty much, that’s all I’ve used it for. I don’t take a lot of pictures, but the ones I have taken that relate to shared experiences (like Lotusphere) have made it up there. In fact, someone sponsored me for a professional Flickr account (thank you!), but it’s about ready to expire. I wasn’t planning on renewing it at that level, but I may have to reconsider after reading this book. The book is about the size of a normal Hacks title, but there’s only 50 hacks in here. As you can imagine, each one goes into much more detail than normal. And there *is* some fun stuff in here. If you have a little background in PHP or Perl, you can really get crazy, too. For instance, I didn’t know you could email photos to your Flickr account. Hack #6 shows how that works, and it explains how Flickr can often serve as a real-time look into breaking events such as the London train bombing. People were using their cell phones to take pictures and then mailing them in to the Flickr account. Or for fun stuff, you can use the Flickr API to build routines to create “ransom note” messages (a different picture for each letter, “glued” together into sentences) in hack #47. Hack #48 shows you how to take one of your photos and create a “slider puzzle” out of it. And in between those two ranges you’ll find a number of things that will cause you, like they did me, to say “Flickr can do that?”…

If you use Flickr and actively load photos out there, this will be a “must read” book to enhance and expand your Flickr experience. Even if you’re just a casual user like me, you’ll have your eyes opened to some new possibilities. Now where was that Flickr renewal email?

Review by Tim E Robertson:

[...]

Flickr has to be the best and most popular photo sharing website on the planet, without doubt. Over the past year since I’ve been a member and wrote an article for MyMac on this number one shutterbug community. I’ve amassed a couple of dozen bookmarks and RSS feeds based Flickr and Flickr related websites. Some include RSS feeds to my favorite photographers, others include sites that help me do fun and cool things with my photos, and others are just cool ways to navigate Flickr’s immense collection of images. In fact, for the last six months, my Safari homepage is a Random Photo Browser that delivers me a page of fresh photos every time I open Safari.

If you’re new to Flickr or want to get more out of it, Flickr Hacks covers just about everything there is know about storing, sorting, and sharing your photos as a Flickr member. What has taken me months to learn and collect in my Flickr bookmark folder, you can learn in about a weekend. One of the appeals of O’Reilly’s series of hack books is that they give you the tools to expand and deepen your experience and use of popular sites like Amazon, Ebay, and Google.

For those new to Flickr, Flickr Hacks introduces you to the basics of setting up an account, uploading your photos to the site, sharing your images, tagging them, joining Flickr pools, and building your own Flickr screensaver and random desktop backgrounds.

The book explains several ways to upload your photos to your Flickr homepage. You can do it through the site itself, you can download a batch loader or your can use two of my favorite apps developed by Fraser Speirs of Connected Flow. He’s built a plug-in uploader for iPhoto and has just released, probably as this book was going to to press, an a Tiger Automator action that enables you to upload a selected image file directly to your Flickr homepage. With this action, you don’t have to open an application, fill in a box, or even convert the size of your selected image. Just control click and upload. Simple, easy, and fast.

For us advance Flickr members, Flickr Hacks reveals what is called the API underpinnings of the site. According to the authors, API is an “incredible application program interface (API), which lets you interact with Flickr in unique and powerful ways.” Pages and pages of various codes and command line language might scare off many potential readers of this book. Even a title with the word “hacks” might either excite the loins of young emerging computer programers or make novice computer users scared they’re doing something illegal. But the latter is not the case. If you carefully read the instructions for the 50 different hacks explained in this book, you can possibly have more fun and save more time navigating Flickr itself.

Of course, the book gives a link to a ZIP archive file of all the individual codes and scripts discussed in the book already saved as text files. As of this writing, the webpage for this link is not posted, but I’m sure that will be remedied very soon.

Some of the more advanced hacks in this books don’t seem worth the trouble for me personally, but many others I plan to give a try. I would like for example to customize my Flickr badge for my blog site, create contact sheets of my favorite Flickr photos, capture all the comments I’ve made on the photos of other Flickr members. The advance hacks explained in this book are not essential to exploring the site, but if you’re interested in learning more about the underpinnings of web programming, learning how to run these programmatic hacks on OS X’s Terminal (Unix) command line or as CGI or PHP scripts on your web site or server, it wouldn’t be a waste of time.

There are other advanced hacks about building a Flickr Color picker, modifying the metadata of your posted photos, tracking the favorite photos of your Flickr contacts, using Google Map to locate other Flickr members, or finding which Flickr members might be listed in your Address Book.

Many hacks in the book are crossed referenced so that after you’ve signed up as a Flickr member, you can basically start with any hack you like. Some hacks are merely just links to fun things you can do with your and other Flickr member’s photos. For example, Hack #46 references FD’s Flickr Toys which is a great collection of online apps that will convert your Flickr images into calendar pages, posters, mock magazine covers, slide shows, and much more. Numerous Flickr pools have been created to showcase cool photo projects based on these fun online tools.

[...]

Review by Conrad J. Obregon:

I must have come late to the party! How did I know so little about Flickr? It is such a natural outgrowth of the Web and digital photography.

Flickr is a web site for the storage and display of photographs by anyone who wants to take the time to post them. In that way, it’s similar to an individual website. But Flickr is so much more.

In the first case, it’s so much easier to load a picture onto Flickr, than to create a website. Sign on, click upload a picture, browse through your computer, find the image you want and click. There it is on screen.

Flickr lets you limit access to the photo in various ways or open it up to the whole world to see. Then you can add tags (or keywords) to your picture that let that photograph be integrated into the larger Flickr community. Note that word community. That concept is a central tenet of Flickr because the site aims at tying its members together. It does this through a number of devices, like allowing its members to set up groups of like minded photographers. For example, there’s a group that features pictures of members looking at pictures of members, or a group that is concerned with the development of Flickr. Members get to comment on each others pictures, and communicate back and forth. And Flickr offers a number of controls so that one can decide just how much or little one wants to participate. And that’s just the start.

I had a number of questions about Flickr. Setting up a website for your pictures lets you exercise far more control over how people view your pictures. I was also concerned about how you protect your property interest in your pictures until I saw that Flickr will import your EXIF data (if you don’t know what that means, it’s probably not an issue that will bother you) including an imbedded copyright.

Meanwhile, what about the book? You can probably learn all of the potential of Flickr by banging around the website, clicking links. But what Giles has done is put it into order with explanations of capabilities of the program and detailed steps on how to access them and set up your pictures the way you want. For those who are interested in the history of the community or in learning about some other participants, there are sidebars which are not essential to read but interesting to get the feel of Flickr. Giles’ writing is accurate and helpful. I easily got onto Flickr (which offers a free membership, although heavy users will want a paying account), uploaded my pictures, and even used those pictures as a feed to a blog. Giles is an apostle of the community aspects of Flickr, and even an old anchorite like me could see where it might be fun to get in on Flickr. My only worry with pursuing Flickr is that I can see where this could easily become an addictive time suck.

If you are not afraid of that, and if you are a digital photographer and don’t know the in-and-outs of Flickr, it’s time to get Giles and get started.

Review by J. Kertesz:

While this wonderfully written book is one for the beginers too, as a veteran of almost two years in flickr, not only had I have joy of reading it but also learned and discovered things I never knew.

Not only teaching, but agrable interviews with those around or working for flickr or products usefull for those having pictures in it, it also conveys so well the spirit of communication of flickr.

I recomend it to all, not only all ages but all competences too, and all over the world who understand english. Hope, soon will be also translated in other major langagues.

In one word: one excellent, usefull and enjoyable book.

Review by François Proulx:

If you wish to add social software capabilities to your Web applications or simply want to have a way to aggregate a bunch of nice pictures from Flickr on your website, this book is for you. You don’t need any prior knowledge of Flickr features or even PHP programming experience. But if you already do, you will quickly enjoy the numerous tutorials. All of them are written in a very clean and simple form.

A great asset of this book is that it truly caters to anyone. A chapter of the book is devoted to give you all the basic skills you need to have in PHP in order to use the Flickr API. The book uses a very powerful programming interface created by of the authors. Morton’s API is, without a doubt, the most intuitive and comprehensive Flickr programming interface out there. It has a very clean PHP5 Object Oriented architecture. All the Flickr elements can be treated as a collection of PHP objects. The authors really know the API in great details, so you can’t go wrong with this book.

A chapter will also tell you how to setup your development environment (including Apache, PHP5 and the required plugins). Wether you’re a PC or Mac user, you will find help here. It will also walk you through the process of registering and generating API keys.

Not only does it cover the usage of the API, but it also explains how to use the Flickr feed services for generating RSS and Atom files. Advanced topics such as uploading photos through the public API are also covered along with source code examples.

I found some of the more advanced examples really helpful for my projects.

Review by Frank Stepanski:

Flickr is the photo sharing web application that started making people like taking photos again, Of course since flickr came on the scene many others have come up such as Zoomr and Yahoo Photos but neither allow developers to truly make use of its data with the flick api which allows sharing and manipulation of its photo data.

This is the first book covering this topic of creating a mashup with flickr so it has the pressure of covering the right material to help newbies like me to understand how to use an api. Although a background in web scripting and or JavaScript is not required since the material is not too technical and the author explains it well enough that the reader does not need to know too much.

The first chapter covers what are mashups and what technologies are used such as client technologies like HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript and DOM, JSON and Ajax. Then the author briefly explains the server-side technologies that are involved like PHP, Perl, REST, SOAP, and databases. A nice introduction on the many pieces of web mashups.

The next chapter gives a quick introduction on using flickr aw a user on how to use some of the tools of flickr like the organizr (to organize your photos into sets), tagging, geo-tagging interface, joining groups, and linking your photos.

The third chapter gets started with getting the flickr API key. Once you get the key the author goes into showing you how to setup your development environment. The author goes though setting up an environment with ASP using IIS (Internet Information Server) and PHP with Apache as well as using Perl in a Windows or Unix environment. Since mashups can use any server-side technology, it is great that the author explains three of the most popular ones for broad range of server-side technologies.

The next chapter focuses in detail about the flickr API itself. Flickr accepts API calls in three different formats such as REST, SOAP, and XML-RPC. The author gives of each even though in my opinion using REST is the easiest and most common. Then flickr methods and objects are dicussed in showing the reader how to retrieve flickr images in any variation by invoking the specific methods and send the right parameters. The author gives some good examples of creating photostreams and putting specific images on your web page.

Chapter 5 goes though the client-side version of manipulating a flickr badge and putting the requests on the server as well. Chapter 6 goes through showing an image gallery using sever-side script in PHP and mixing in a little Ajax for good measure. Chapter 7 shows you how to authenticate using an API kit with some open source PHP tools to create some more robust applications. Chapter 8 shows you how to create an upload page using the flickr api.

The rest of the book goes into more examples of flickr mashups using other open source tools like ImageMagick, GoogleMaps, GreaseMonkey, RSS, Technorati, and others. Too much to cover but this book has it all. A great book on learning more about mashups and api ans using the flickr api to create some new and exciting web applications.

Review by Thomas Duff:

It’s hard not to get inundated with all the talk of “Web 2.0″ these days… Everything is “Ajax this, mashup that”. But what exactly *is* a mashup, and how do you build one? Wrox has started a Mashup series of books, and I got a chance to take a look at Flickr Mashups by David Wilkinson. This is an excellent intro to the concept, focused on the Flickr website for content manipulation.

Contents: Rewriting the Web; Flickr – A Short Tour; Getting Ready to Mash; The Flickr API; Flickr Feeds; Remixing Flickr Using the API; Authenticating with Flickr; Uploading Photos; Remixing Flickr Using Greasemonkey; Working with ImageMagick, Visualizing the News; Searching the Blogosphere; Displaying Your Photos with Google Maps; Caching Your Data; Answers to Exercises; Flickr API Methods; Response Data Structures; Useful Resources; Index

To start with, you shouldn’t have the expectation that you’ll be able to (or even want to) run every mashup that’s here. Rather than confine his examples to a single small set of technology tools, Wilkinson uses a wide array of software, such as PHP, Perl, JavaScript, Java, Greasemonkey, ImageMagick, and others. When he first talks about a technology like Greasemonkey, he gives some basic information to get the software and install it. From there, he builds the mashup with some pretty detailed explanations on the code and results. He states in the forward that the examples *should* be easy enough to follow even if you’re not terribly familiar with the language, like PHP. Overall that seems to be the case. But to be honest, you’ll probably get a lot more out of the book if you’re already conversant with PHP, as a lot of the examples use that. But even if the particular language of the example isn’t your forte, you should be able to take the general idea and apply the concepts to your tool of choice.

Another thing that is done very well done in this book is an explanation of the Flickr API. A solid, accessible API is critical to successful mashup use, and his explanation of how the Flickr API works is excellent. From getting your own API key to creating SQL feeds of Flickr data, he covers a number of possibilities that should have any photo-happy mashup artist coding in short order. The Flickr site and API are a constant work in progress, so you can’t view this as a definitive guide to the package. The only way you can get that is to visit the website. But you’ll receive a grounding in the fundamentals here, so you’ll be well-equipped to handle the new stuff as it comes out.

Overall, I think this is a great series, and I’m looking forward to reading other Mashup titles. Flickr Mashups got the brain moving in areas I had never thought of, and I can see how this would be a must-read for any coder who can’t live without their Flickr subscription…