Using Flickr API to search photos by location or language
Some popular words, like "food," are used all over the world as loan words.
I am trying to use flickr.photos.search to get photos from one specific language or region.
I didn't find a setting for this in http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.search.html
I tried these two ways, but neither worked:
I searched in Google and only found that YQL can search by location. (I will use YQL in another way, too many calls will over the api will be limited.)
I also found that in flickr.photos.search one can set a lat, lon, and radius, but the range is a circle, so this will not limit a search to a specific country.
None of these are good choices for me. Can anyone help?
Answer
There are actually a few interesting ways to do this.
The way I would do it is to first find the place you are looking for by using the place API:
flickr.places.find: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.find.html This will return a list of WOE (Where on Earth) ids for a given query. Your query can be anything from a street address to a country.
Once you have the WOE id, you could then submit a flickr.photos.search query including the optional place_id or WOE id.
Another fun way to do this would be to call the flickr.places.tagsForPlace method once you have a WOE id, and then search for your photos by these tags. This might produce more interesting results and also weed out the users who didnt specify a place, but did specify tags.