Caching of Flickr API calls

There are situations where you call the same Flickr API methods over and over again. An example is a web page that shows your latest ten sets. In those cases caching can significantly improve performance.

The FlickrAPI module comes with its own in-memory caching framework. By default it caches at most 200 entries, which time out after 5 minutes. These defaults are probably fine for average use. To use the cache, just pass cache=True to the constructor:

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key, cache=True)

To tweak the cache, instantiate your own instance and pass it some constructor arguments:

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key, cache=True)
flickr.cache = flickrapi.SimpleCache(timeout=300, max_entries=200)

timeout is in seconds, max_entries in number of cached entries.

Using the Django caching framework

The caching framework was designed to have the same interface as the Django low-level cache API - thanks to those guys for designing a simple and effective cache. The result is that you can simply plug the Django caching framework into FlickrAPI, like this:

from django.core.cache import cache
flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key, cache=True)
flickr.cache = cache

That’s all you need to enable a wealth of caching options, from database-backed cache to multi-node in-memory cache farms.