My book, Flickr Mashups, is now available from Amazon.com. To celebrate the launch, I've created a new Flickr Mashups section for this web site for both existing and potential readers.

Read the full article for "Flickr Mashups Book"»

Joel Carranza has written a nice little Greasemonkey script, Flickr Discussion Images, that allows you to view all the images in a Flickr group discussion thread—it's perfect for browsing through threads in groups like Utata where the pictures often are the thread. It adds three links underneath the main post, which allow you to switch easily between the normal full view, images only, or image thumbnails only.

You can download and install his script from here.

Earlier this week, Flickr made some changes to the way static URLs to images are constructed and introduced the idea of farms. For some time now, many of the API calls have been returning an extra farm attribute, but now we can finally see how this new information is used.

Read the full article for "Farming Flickr"»

I've just fixed a minor bug in my Escape Entities Greasemonkey script that caused the page to jump back to the top of the document when used. You can get the updated version here.

Christmas is coming, the otter's got his hat...

There's a new Easter Egg on Flickr (or should that be Christmas pudding...?). If you add a note to a photo with the text "ho ho ho hat", a red Santa hat miraculously appears. If you use "ho ho ho beard", you get a fluffy white beard.

The naysayers are already complaining about this in FlickrHelp, so try it out now whilst the fun lasts. But do remember folks, use your Santa hats and beards responsibly...

The hot news today is that Flickr have just removed their upload limit for Pro account holders. Previously, it was possible to upload up to 2 Gigabytes per month—now there is no limit. It's debatable just how much of a difference this will actually make to most people—I never managed to get anywhere near that 2Gb limit anyway.

It's good news for free account holders too—their upload limit is increased from 20 Megabytes per month to a very respectable 100 Megabytes. The 200 photo and 3 photoset limits do, however, remain.

You can see the new limits documented in the Flickr FAQ.

Flickr have just made a slight change to the way in which the authentication for third-party applications works. Now, whenever you redirect to Flickr for authentication, the user is forced to grant permissions to your application again—even if they have previously granted the necessary permissions:

This means that third-party applications can no longer silently retrieve a token for you—although, they can still store a token away and keep using that until the user revokes it. Over on the Flick Developer's Mailing List, Stewart says that this is the result of fixing a security-related problem. Fixing potential security holes is, of course, a very good thing. On the other hand, the authentication process now becomes rather clunky from a user's point of view.

Stewart goes on to say:

"we are planning on improvements to the user experience of the auth flow soon, so […] it won't seem as jarring for users."

I do hope those improvements aren't a long time in coming...

Update: and a few days later, the changes are rolled back—apparently they're not necessary for web authentication.

I noticed earlier that there's been an update to the Flickr API—you can now specify a group id when calling flickr.photos.search to restrict the search to a particular. In the past, we only had flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos available for the searching of group pools and that was rather restrictive—you could only filter by user, or by tag, and the tag filter only allowed one tag to be specified at a time.

The addition of group id to flickr.photos.search is great news—it will provide a much more useful way of finding photos within group pools than we've had before. With it, we can now search pools and filter on multiple tags, date, geodata and licence type.

When you post to groups such as Flickr, or to blogs using tools such as Movable Type, you are often free to use a selection of HTML tags. This is very handy for adding links, images and basic formatting, but it comes with a downside—if you ever want to write an HTML snippet that someone can read, perhaps in order to allow them to cut and paste it, you have to manually escape the different HTML entities. < becomes <, > becomes >, & becomes & and " becomes "

To make life easier, I've written a Greasemonkey script that attaches itself to any <textarea> elements on the page and provides a handy icon that when clicked on converts any special characters into their corresponding entities.

Click here to read more and install the script.