Scripting News: Anatomy of a Flickr photo (its metadata)

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Anatomy of a Flickr photo (its metadata)

Thanks to great advice yesterday from SN readers, I am now able to loop over all my photos from a script.

Today I wrote a glue script for Flickr.photos.getInfo, which returns a table of structured information about the picture. It's a fascinating piece of metadata, and something a lot of people should look at, but I don't imagine too many have, because it's buried under so layers of code.

So I took a snapshot of the metadata for a picture that I took at BarCamp last weekend. The page is not dynamic, so if notes or tags get added, the snapshot won't change. More: The data from flickr.photos.getSizes for the same pic.

PS: The table was generated from an age-old Frontier macro that I had a lot of trouble locating.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:29 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jul Sep