ObjectiveFlickr: Mining the Photo-sphere

URL: http://github.com/lukhnos/objectiveflickr

Code Quality: Production (used in several shipping apps)

Description:

ObjectiveFlickr is a set of Objective-C libraries by Lukhnos D. Liu that impement the Flickr APIs and allow you to access flickr public resources using an API key obtained from the Flickr.com web site.

ObjectiveFlicker can be used for both iPhone and MacOSX applications; it’s an asynchronous API so you can set up retrieval of a number of images form flickr and draw them as they come in without blocking the main application flow of your app via a series of delegates that you implement that objectiveFlickr uses to keep you up to date on the status of your calls into Flickr.  The library does a very nice Mac-like job of hiding most of the Flickr XML from you turing it into an easy to access/manage dictionary from which you can pull metadata about images, or almost anything else thats exposed by the Flickr API including user-suppliedtags and geo-data that may be associated with an image.

One the hard parts about using this framework for real apps in the past was that for all commercial applications you needed to apply for a special commercial API key from Yahoo.  In the past such applications often seemed to go into the bit-bucket and never get a reply from Yahoo (this author has had an outstanding commercial API key request for over  a year).  However in late 2009 Yahoo seems to have automated the process and now commercial API requests seem to be granted immediately by their API key request form – at least for common requests not on behalf of  requestors that do not ”represent a major brand or large enterprise.” (their terms, not ours..).