Flickr is a popular photo-sharing website. Like many "Web 2.0" and "social" websites, Flickr includes a programmatic interface through
which other programs and websites can view and manage photos, comments, groups, tags, and other Flickr assets. I recently started work on a website that offers its users
a customized homepage where they can upload pictures, enter biographical and contact information, and integrate with other social websites, such as Flickr. Specifically, a
user can supply their Flickr screen name and have a random collection of their public photos in Flickr appear on their customized homepage.
Flickr's API includes a number of methods, such as flickr.people.findByUsername and
flickr.photos.getInfo, which return information about a particular Flickr user and a particular photo, respectively. To call one of these methods you need
to send a properly formatted message to the Flickr API URL, which returns the results in a specified format. Flickr's API
documentation provides all of the gory details.
If you're more interested in interacting with Flickr from an ASP.NET website and are less interested in the low-level details, you'll be delighted to know that there are
mature, open source .NET libraries for accessing the Flickr API. With these libraries you don't need to know the ins and outs of the Flickr API; instead, you just work with
the .NET library from your ASP.NET application and let it handle all the low-level formatting and message transport details.
This article explores the open source Flickr API library called Flickr.Net, which was created by
Sam Judson and was used in my aforementioned project. Specifically, we'll look at how to create an ASP.NET website
that displays a smattering of randomly selected pictures from a particular Flickr user, along with how to show a specific picture's comments (if any exist). And the complete
code in both Visual Basic and C# is available for download at the end of this article. Read on to learn more!
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