Dear Fotki
I have been a faithful user of your service for years. I have 18,000+ images there constituting 40+ GB. I have them organized the way I like, and many are tagged. My point is I have a significant investment in your service, and due to that I am paid in full through 2011.
I have never been a big fan of flickr. I have an account there, but I have found their organizational style works great for the stream of consciousness that I used to use when I used to take a lot of photos with my phone. And perhaps I will get back into that. But for actual photo storage, I hate it. I prefer the more traditional style of the fotki organizational model.
That being said, we need an API for premium members. I need to be able to do all the cool stuff that I can do on flickr, with fotki. I need to be able to easily pull photos into another application based on various queries. I need to be able to integrate my fotki library into my other web life. I will NOT use facebook to store my photos, but I would love to be able to easily and automatically pull my fotki pics in.
I have thought about writing a scraper to get them, but that is really really absurd. I have thought about writing something to sync my fotki and flickr accounts, but that is also dumb.
There was talk of an API in a fotki journal post in 2005, but that is the last mention of it I can find.
Please step up to the plate. Mimic the flickr API. It really wouldn’t be that hard. Make it available to the premium members only.
Let me know if you need testers. I will be glad to help however I can.
bryan
i kept rewriting my php media browser that was on my site to add features that i kept copying off flickr (down to the smooth movement of thumbnails as you click the left and right arrows to navigate to other pics). eventually i stopped and asked myself, “why do i keep trying to copy flickr, why not just use flickr?”
i had all of my pictures organized in a directory structure like your fotki appears to be. i wrote something to go into each directory, upload all the pics, then add them to a “set” named the same as the directory. sets can then be added to “collections” which basically gave me the same hierarchal structure i had before.
so while the main “photostream” is everything lumped together by date, i never really browse or find my pics that way. i view by sets or by tags. new pics are uploaded from ruby and php scripts i have, or through email from my iphone (flickr gives you a unique, random email address that anything attached to emails to it get uploaded to your account) or from an app on my imac that uses the flickr api. then i pull the pics back out through the api rss feeds which makes newly uploaded pictures appear on my site.