This is a library for using the Flickr API at the Flickr Foundation.

It's not a general-purpose Flickr API library. It provides a subset of Flickr API methods with the following goals:

• Provide reusable code that can be called across all our projects.
• Abstract away some of the details of the Flickr API -- for example, licenses are returned as complete dictionaries, rather than as the numeric license IDs returned by Flickr API methods.
• Apply types to all results, so the Flickr API can be used safely in a typed context.

Using the Flickr API is fairly simple: you make an HTTP GET to https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?api_key={api_key} and pass one or more URL query parameters. One of those query parameters must be method, then you add other parameters depending on the API method.

There's an abstract class that represents this interface:

import abc
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET


class FlickrApi(abc.ABC):
    @abc.abstractmethod
    def call(self, method: str, params: dict[str, str] | None = None) -> ET.Element:
        return NotImplemented

The idea is that you can extend this class with "method" classes that wrap specific API methods, and make HTTP GET calls through this call() method:

class GetSinglePhotoMethods(FlickrApi):
    def get_single_photo(self, photo_id: str) -> ET.Element:
        return self.call(method="flickr.photos.getInfo", params={"photo_id": photo_id})

This separates the code for making HTTP requests and separating the responses.

The library includes a single implementation of FlickrApi for making HTTP requests, using httpx, but you could swap it out if you wanted to use e.g. requests or urllib3. This httpx implementation is the default implementation.

>>> from flickr_photos_api import FlickrApi
>>> api = FlickrApi(api_key="…", user_agent="…")

>>> photo = api.get_single_photo(photo_id="14898030836")

>>> photo
{'id': '14898030836', 'title': 'NASA Scientists Says', …}

>>> photo["license"]
{'id': 'cc-by-2.0', 'label': 'CC BY 2.0', 'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/'}

>>> photo["url"]
'https://www.flickr.com/photos/lassennps/14898030836/'

1. Install flickr-photos-api from PyPI:

   $ pip install flickr-photos-api

2. Construct an instance of FlickrApi. You need to pass a user-agent that identifies you, and a Flickr API key.

   from flickr_photos_api import FlickrApi
   
   api = FlickrApi(api_key="…", user_agent="…")

3. Call methods on FlickrApi. There's no complete list of methods right now; look at the files X_methods.py in the api directory.

   Methods that return collections of photos also support page and per_page parameters to control pagination.

If you want to make changes to the library, there are instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md.

This project is dual-licensed as Apache-2.0 and MIT.