Monkeying Around With Hidden Flickr Search Parameters

My long term infatuation with flickr may be my undoing… (skipping past the gripes about flickr’s design changes) (also skipping past whatever monkey goo that Google is offering for your photos) (anything else?).

To me, what’s more important about flickr is what you do not see on the site or the (still partly crippled) mobile app. It’s about the data, man. The metadata, woman. And the API.

Enough pre-amble.

Yesterday, a long series of tweets about cameras and lens started because Gardner Campbell was looking for lens suggestions (his daughter has a neat summer art/photography project)

Ok photo people: New DX Nikon for @jeenbeecampbell. Which first prime lens: 35mm or 50mm? @twoodwar @cogdog

— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) May 30, 2015

I still stand by my nifty 50 lens, but that’s not the point.

The thing is when you upload photos to flickr, information embedded in the image travels with it, not only date, but things like the camera model and lens, and much much more. As Tom Woodward pointed out

@GardnerCampbell @jeenbeecampbell @cogdog also keep in mind you can browse flickr by lens http://t.co/Yu3zuoDiGo

— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) May 30, 2015

the Flickrriver site has a great tool that lets you see photos shared in flickr taken with various lenses, so one way to decide maybe how images compare with the Nikon 50mm f/1.4D vs the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D.

I have a 2009 post on my camera history up til then, but the flickr searches that once worked to list of my photos taken with the cameras seems busted and even with yesterday’s tinkerings, I can’t get the older camera model parameters to work (this links shows all my photos taken with my current Canon 7D).

And down the hole I went…

I found a pair of 2008 blog posts that showed some extra search parameters you can use in flickr search to filter results by aperture and focal length.

It took some playing around, but I ended up doing things like looking for all flower photos taken with a particular camera and setting:

Breaking down the URL, means I am asking for all photos labeled “flower” taken with a Nikon D300 with a maximum aperture of 2.0

https://www.flickr.com/search/?<strong>camera=nikon%2Fd3300</strong>&<strong>exif_max_aperture=2.0</strong>&<strong>text=flower</strong>

Or I can search for all my own photos where the maximum aperture was 1.6 (my shallow depth of field photos). It says there are 2153 of them, that seems low. I shoot a lot wide open

That first w= string is my user id. It’s left as an exercise for the URL reader to make that a search that shows all photos where the maximum aperture is f/5.6

https://www.flickr.com/search/?<strong>w=37996646802@N01</strong>&q=&<strong>exif_max_aperture=1.6</strong>

Or flip it to see how many I have where I shoot at f/22 or smaller — the min/max bigger/smaller on aperture is always confusing low aperture numbers is a bigger hole of light and give shallow depth of field; high aperture numbers is a tiny hole and give deep depth of field.

But you can also add elements for maximum or minimum focal length so getting back to Gardner’s quest, let’s compare photos tagged road, where the maximum aperture is f/1.8 and the maximum focal length is 50mm – one can see these are wide open aperture shots of “roads” taken with a maximum focal length 50mm lens

Or for URL readers… (get how it works?)
https://www.flickr.com/search/?exif_max_aperture=1.8&exif_max_focallen=50&tag_mode=all&z=t&advanced=1&tags=road

And we compare that to the same except setting the maximum focal length as 35mm

https://www.flickr.com/search/?exif_max_aperture=1.8&exif_max_focallen=35&tag_mode=all&z=t&advanced=1&tags=road

Does that help pick lenses? Maybe not. There are differences because of different photographers and subjects. But hey, I am not a camera comparison lab.

I just like to monkey around with URLs and hidden search parameters.

How much data goes with a photo? You can explore with the Flickr API Garden for the one that lets you see what the API returns for EXIF data from a single photo. If you plug in the ID for a recent (or any flickr) photo:

You get a whack sock of information (way more than you can use on the search form). If you scan closely, you might see at the end my own custom metadata that I add to every photo I save in Aperture (good luck getting that feature in the new Apple Photos app), including my creative commons license. This information travels with the original photo whereever it goes (well except for the different size copies that flickr makes, they squeeze out the meta data on derivative sizes).

There is a virtual universe of information you can maybe appreciate, and perhaps start to want to get a better understanding of what can be done with APIs. I am just about one step down that road…

Top / Featured image credits: flickr photo by Leah Gregg http://flickr.com/photos/simonehudson/1879148204 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

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