Utility methods

There are a couple of useful methods for handling photos.

All utility methods require ElementTree to be available, so either use Python 2.5 or newer, or install it as described above.

Walking through all photos in a set

It may be useful to be able to easily perform an operation on every photo in a set. This is what the walk_set function does. It accepts a photoset ID and returns a generator:

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key)
for photo in flickr.walk_set('2b640a3efc262f03567ee93cfd544e14'):
    print photo.get('title')

The function uses the Flickr API call flickr.photosets.getPhotos and accepts the same parameters. The resulting “photo” objects are ElementTree objects for the <photo .../> XML elements.

Walking through a search result

Walking through a search result is done in much the same way as walking through all photos in a set:

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key)
for photo in flickr.walk(tag_mode='all',
        tags='sybren,365,threesixtyfive',
        min_taken_date='2008-08-20',
        max_taken_date='2008-08-30'):
    print photo.get('title')

The function uses the Flickr API call flickr.photos.search and accepts the same parameters. The resulting “photo” objects are ElementTree objects for the <photo .../> XML elements.

Influencing the number of calls to Flickr

The walking functions described above only call Flickr when they have to. When they do, they fetch per_page (default 50) photos simultaneously. The per_page parameter can be used to tweak the number of calls. The following will perform two calls two Flickr:

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key)
set = flickr.walk_set('<set id>', per_page=15)
for photo in set[:25]:
    print photo.get('title')

The first call will get photos 0-14, the next call will get 15-29, even though only the first 25 photo titles will be shown.

Another example, if you only want to show the titles of photos 5-20:

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key)
set = flickr.walk_set('<set id>' per_page=20)
for photo in set[5:21]:
    print photo.get('title')

The photos will always be fetched from the first page onwards. In the above example, the first twenty photos will all be fetched, even though the title of the first five will be skipped.