Using Flickr API to search photos by location or language

Question

Some popular words, like "food," are used all over the world as loan words.

I am trying to use flickr.photos.search to get photos from one specific language or region. I didn't find a setting for this in http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.search.html

I tried these two ways, but neither worked:

• http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=XXXXXXXXXX&tags=food&format=json&location=japan

• //lang=jp

I searched in Google and only found that YQL can search by location. (I will use YQL in another way, too many calls will over the api will be limited.)

I also found that in flickr.photos.search one can set a lat, lon, and radius, but the range is a circle, so this will not limit a search to a specific country.

None of these are good choices for me. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

There are actually a few interesting ways to do this.

The way I would do it is to first find the place you are looking for by using the place API:

flickr.places.find: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.find.html This will return a list of WOE (Where on Earth) ids for a given query. Your query can be anything from a street address to a country.

Once you have the WOE id, you could then submit a flickr.photos.search query including the optional place_id or WOE id.

Another fun way to do this would be to call the flickr.places.tagsForPlace method once you have a WOE id, and then search for your photos by these tags. This might produce more interesting results and also weed out the users who didnt specify a place, but did specify tags.