I would like to test the Flickr API using Matlab. There is no Flickr API library available for Matlab, so I have to do everything myself.
I am having troubles pretty much in the beginning: cannot cope with authentication. The process description is here: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/auth.oauth.html. However, I do not understand a couple of things in Signing Requests:
First,
the key is the concatenated values of the Consumer Secret
and Token Secret, separated by an '&'.
What are the Consumer Secret and the Token Secret? I only have the API key and API secret, issued for my test application by Flickr.
Second, the result of signing a string (which should be the output of the HMAC SHA1 function, i.e. a number, right?) in the example is w18YS2bONDPL%2FzgyzP5XTr5af4%3D. What is it? It is neither a hex number nor a base64 string.
I've solved this task. The answer I put in the form of a short tutorial to Matlab file exchange: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/34162. I will also keep a list of additional hints in my blog http://texnical.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/flickr-api-with-user-authentication-in-matlab/.
I'd like to acknowledge the help of Sam Judson from the Flickr API discussion list.