Linking to an informal group of Flickr photos associated by date

I’ve wanted a way to link to batches of Flickr photos associated by date without grouping them explicitly. There are probably cleaner ways to do this, but Flickr’s search mechanism can be used for this purpose, as demonstrated in a couple of my recent posts.

Start with http://flickr.com/search/ and add the following criteria as parameters:

Whose Pictures?

Restrict search results to a particular user ID (such as yours) using the w parameter. You can look up user IDs easily using idGettr. If present in the user ID, the “@” symbol should be escaped as %40.

w=93931947%40N00

Of What?

Define a search query with q and specify what should be searched with m. The possible values for m are text and tags. In my case, I’m just looking for photos tagged as drawings.

q=drawing
m=tags

From When?

Use the d parameter to define a date range to search. Only photos that fall within this range which match the query defined above will be returned. The date range is given in three parts delimited by hyphens.

First, either posted or taken is used to specify whether you’re talking about the date the photos were posted to Flickr or actually taken. Then the starting date is given, followed by the ending date.

Dates are given as eight-digit strings in the format YYYYMMDD (year, month, day, padded with zeros if necessary). To search a single day, give the same date for the start and finish, as I have:

d=posted-20070202-20070202

Display Mode

If the z parameter is given the value t, the results will be displayed as a grid of thumbnail images. If omitted, matching photos will be presented in a less compact annotated list format.

z=t

Putting it All Together

Separate each parameter=value pair with an ampersand (“&”) and use a question mark to indicate where the parameters begin. The final URL will look something like this:

http://flickr.com/search/?w=93931947%40N00&q=drawing&m=tags&d=posted-20070202-20070202&z=t

As I said, it’s quite likely there’s already an easier way to do this. If not, I suppose I could write a little script to do the trick.

Posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007. Tags: code.