API: Get Flickr Photos by orientation

Question

I'd like to get only landscape photos from Flickr but I don't see any parameters that lets me do that. Does anyone know if there's a way?

Answer 1

In the response from the flickr.photos.search feature, you can specify a number of optional parameters know as extras. For each URL (in format of url_s,url_q...) extra that you specify you'll get the following information.

Sample JSON Reponse

{
    ...
    "photos": { 
        "page": 1, 
        "pages": "478", 
        "perpage": 2, 
        "total": "4775", 
        "photo": [
            { 
                ...
                "longitude": 0, "accuracy": 0, "context": 0, "media": "photo",
                "media_status": "ready",
                "url_q": "https:\/\/farm4.staticflickr.com\/0000\/000_000_q.jpg",
                "height_q": "150",
                "width_q": "150",
                ...
            },
            { 
                ...
                "longitude": 0, "accuracy": 0, "context": 0, "media": "photo",
                "media_status": "ready",
                "url_q": "https:\/\/farm4.staticflickr.com\/0000\/000_111_q.jpg",
                "height_q": "150",
                "width_q": "150",
                ...
            },
        ] }, 
        "stat": "ok" 
};

If you want the URL for the Q sized photo, you will have the height_q and width_q attributes. If width_q is greater than height_q the orientation is landscape. If it's the opposite the orientation of the photo is portrait, otherwise it's a perfect square.

In Javascript you could write a function like this:

function determinePhotoOrientation(width, height) {
    if (width > height) {
        return 'landscape';
    } else if (width < height) {
        return 'portrait';
    }
    return 'square';
}

If you are using a different language you can make a similar function in that language to help you determine the orientation.