Flickr

About Flickr

The Flickr API provides programmatic access to Flickr's photo-sharing platform, covering photo and video upload, replacement, and management; photosets, galleries, and collections; groups, discussions, and pools; comments, favorites, and tags; geo-tagging and place lookup; user and contact information; camera and EXIF data; and account statistics. Requests can be made in REST, XML-RPC, or SOAP formats, with responses available in REST, XML-RPC, SOAP, or JSON, and authentication is handled through Flickr's auth and OAuth methods.

The API is available for non-commercial use by outside developers, with commercial use possible by prior arrangement. Documentation includes guides on encoding, user authentication, dates, tags, URLs, buddyicons, and collections, along with terms of use and API key registration.

Third-party API kits and libraries exist for numerous languages and platforms, including ActionScript, C, Cold Fusion, Common Lisp, Delphi, Go, Java, .NET, Node.js, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, REALbasic, and Ruby, though these kits are not maintained or supported by Flickr.

Key features

• Photo and video upload API with support for replacing photos and asynchronous uploads
• Search, browse, and retrieve photos by tags, geo-location, favorites, and context
• Photosets, galleries, and collections management (create, edit, order, add/remove photos)
• Groups, discussion topics/replies, and pools management
• Stats API for photo, photostream, and photoset views, referrers, and domains
• OAuth-based user authentication

Frequently asked questions