My little Flickr action for Automator is finally the action I hoped she would be:
That’s right, just pick a color - any color - and the action will download images that match that color as closely as possible. It’s certainly not a useful tool, but it sure is fun. And a great way to see some cool, usually abstract, photographs. Use it to make a collage. Impress your friends.
This is almost a full rewrite of the original code and besides downloading the actual photos, it makes - get this - zero Flickr API calls. That’s right. Zero. It’s not hard to figure out how that is, but trust me, the alternative wasn’t pretty: An action that takes 20 minutes to analyze the color tags on over 4000 photos is not user friendly. So I had to find a creative way to both speed it up and prevent every single user of this action from making 4000+ API calls. Zero calls ended up being the best solution. And the best part is that it’s fully automated (Automator-ed?) on my side, so I don’t have to do anything to make sure that Download Color Field Images 2.0 always has access to the latest color data.
So go give it a try!
Once downloaded, put the .action file in ~/Library/Automator/
ps: now I can get back to figuring out that dang GPS thing.
OK - you’ve got me interested! Can’t try it here on my PC though…
Was wondering about your 0 API calls so I had a look at the RSS feed for the group… <media:category scheme=”urn:flickr:tags”> - that is cool… That makes it so much easier to grab the tags of all the photos in a group…
Is there a way to control how many results are in the RSS feed? Or which page of results you get?
Actually, it’s not using the RSS feed either
soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…
I have a separate Automator action that gets built along with this one. It’s job is to read the photo information for color tagged photos, and build a cache of the color data. It’s part of a workflow that periodically rescans the group, takes not of any added/deleted photos, and uploads the updated cache to mugshot.blakeseely.com. The Download action only looks at this cache instead of making any API calls.
So, it’s kind of cheating to say zero API calls
Something is making the calls, but it’s not the Download action. And that something is only making the calls once a day or week.
Ahhh - thanks for the explanation! And thanks for getting me to look at the RSS feeds as well - I’d never looked at them before and didn’t know they contained more info than could be easily got through the API (well - loading 1 RSS feed seems quicker and easier than lots of calls to photos.getInfo to find out the tags for photos in a group)… Now to try and figure out a way to get more than 10 results in the feed…
I have a mac w/OS10. Don’t understand your program at all. Tried to drag it to my automator and nothing happens.