Flickr, cURL, & my new Yahoo ID
So I just merged my Flickr account with a new Yahoo ID. No biggie. Except as a result, the script I wrote to automate uploading a daily screenshot of this site no longer works.
The thing is, I can’t seem to find any documentation of the interface I was using (my script is based on this script). It uses or rather used cURL to upload directly to Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploader_go.gne exactly) from the command line.
I’ve tried updating my id/pass in the script but, as expected, that didn’t work. I haven’t found anything useful on Flickr’s API or Tools pages and a search of their forums was fruitless as well. Anyone know of some documentation I might have missed? (And no, the query pictured above wasn’t my only search—but it had the funniest results.)
Update
The eventual solution.
004 Comments
I’m pretty sure a lot of the older API stuffs don’t wok with Yahoo IDs. I remember reading about this way back when they first start allowing Yahoo IDs.
I would imagine the method you’re using —
uploader_go.gneis deprecated. That’s definitely not in line with the current, more RESTful stuff Flickr is doing, which is documented here: flickr.com/services/api/upload.api.htmlMost of the Flickr API stuff is pretty simple. i bet you can write yourself an all-new uploader script, using the non-deprecated API tools, in no time flat — especially if you use one of the many great API kits (there are several available for PHP, Python, Ruby … just about any language you can think of, really).
BTW, uploading a daily screenshot of your site is a great idea. I’ve seen your screenshots, but I never realized it was automated. I might just have to do that. There’s a great little Python script called webkit2png that will get good screenshots for you — and uploading should be pretty painless. Hrm… :)
Blech. Yeah, I saw that stuff. I really liked the fact that the cURL solution was a single line, with a single payload. No getting and setting tokens and waiting for and acting on responses. I appreciate the power of the REST APIs but in this specific case they just seem like overkill.
Shaun, you can still use cURL for uploading. It’s not a single though.
You make a POST request to http://api.flickr.com/services/upload
in curl you just set
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $vars);
where $vars are the POST fields:
Authentication has to be done first and is documented here.
Thanks Alexander. But like I said, for uploading a single file once a day, getting an API key and jumping through the authentication hoops seems like overkill. I ended up AppleScripting Mail.app to take advantage of Flickr’s Uploading by email.
I’ll post the scripts I use to make it all happen this weekend for those who might be interested.