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"»

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.