Welcome to this tutorial where we will learn how to use the Flickr API with Python.

What is the Flickr API

Flickr has an API (short for Application Programming Interface) that allows to access Flickr data in a structured way, without the need of interacting with the user interface.

How to Get a Flickr API Key

In order to interact with the Flickr API, you will need to get the Flickr API Keys.
You can view the API keys as the username and password to the API.

To create your Flickr API keys, go to flickr.com/services/api/keys/.

Create an Application
You will first need to create an application. Click on “create your first”.
Request an API Key
Then, make a request for an API key by clicking on “Request an API Key”

Then, click on “Request an API Key”.

Flickr will create two API keys:

key: A public key that can be viewed as the username of your application
secret: A private key that can be viewed as the password of your application

Keep both in a safe place and do not share it to anyone.

You can find your API keys by going to the App Garden and selecting “Apps by You” on the right-hand side.

Install The Flickr API Python Library

$ pip install flickrapi

Store API Keys in a Separate File

Full Python Code

from flickrapi import FlickrAPI

from api_keys import flickr_keys

key, secret = flickr_keys.values()

flickr = FlickrAPI(
                key, 
                secret, 
                format='parsed-json'
                )


# All the extra data that I want to have
extras='owner_name,license,geo,description,url_sq,url_t,url_s,url_q,url_m,url_n,url_z,url_c,url_l,url_o'

photos = flickr.photos.search(
    text='Quebec City', # Search term
    per_page=5, # Number of results per page
    license='4,5,6,7,8,9,10',  # Attribution Licenses
    extras=extras, 
    privacy_filter=1, #public photos
    safe_search=1 # is safe
    )

Licenses

To know which licenses that you want, look here.

I created a dictionary that can be used for attribution mapping.

{'0': {'name': 'All Rights Reserved', 'url': ''},
 '1': {'name': 'Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/'},
 '2': {'name': 'Attribution-NonCommercial License',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/'},
 '3': {'name': 'Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/'},
 '4': {'name': 'Attribution License',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/'},
 '5': {'name': 'Attribution-ShareAlike License',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/'},
 '6': {'name': 'Attribution-NoDerivs License',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/'},
 '7': {'name': 'No known copyright restrictions',
  'url': 'https://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/'},
 '8': {'name': 'United States Government Work',
  'url': 'http://www.usa.gov/copyright.shtml'},
 '9': {'name': 'Public Domain Dedication (CC0)',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/'},
 '10': {'name': 'Public Domain Mark',
  'url': 'https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/'}}

Photo Sizes

parameter	image size
url_o	Original size of image
url_c	Medium-size image 800×800
url_q	Square image 150×150
url_s	Square image 75,75
url_t	Thumbnail image 100px on largest width
url_n	Small image 320px on largest width

Enjoyed This Post?

Jean-Christophe Chouinard

SEO Strategist at Tripadvisor, ex- Seek (Melbourne, Australia). Specialized in technical SEO. Writer in Python, Information Retrieval, SEO and machine learning. Guest author at SearchEngineJournal, SearchEngineLand and OnCrawl.

How to use Flickr API with Python (Example)