Lately I’ve been looking for an easy elegant way to bring my photos into my personal haigarmen.com site. I’ve been using Flickr for years and believe it’s still the best photo-sharing web service out there. One of the things that makes it exceptional is it’s robust API (Application Programming Interface), an aspect I’ve been meaning to dig into for a while now. So I decided to pull photos from my Flickr account instead of uploading my photos to the web more than once.
This little PhotoWall project is an effort to understand more about the Flickr API and also see what is possible with Javascript and CSS3. The page works on Safari really well because it uses the cutting edge WebKit technology. Unfortunately the page works poorly on Firefox right now.
I began by reading through the documentation and some examples of how to use it. Then I put together a simple HTML example that pulls my public Flickr photos into a Javascript/CSS3 enabled page. Here it is at http://www.haigarmen.com/photos.
The functionality of the page replicates the popular browser plugin Cooliris and relies on your use of the arrow keys to quickly browse the hundreds of images. I really like the instant updated aspect of this type of interface and a sense of the macro level of the larger photo archive.
Recently there’s been a fair bit of chatter about Flash being unnecessary because HTML5 and CSS3 will surpass it in functionality. I’m not quite convinced of this yet but I think with WebKit some amazing rich interactions are becoming possible.
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