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Summary

An image API that would allow developers to access images from Commons programmatically.

Proposal

The Flickr image API has proven to be very useful and popular with developers. It allows applications to use JSONP requests in pure Javascript to access content from Flickr, with a variety of

Motivation

An API of this sort would help to make the images on Commons more distributed, while maintaining citation and licensing information, programatically.

This might also make it possible to build applications that could not only consume images and metadata, but help build out the metadata on images: for instance, one could imagine creative image tagging applications (a game, perhaps) that could increase the category tags on imags.

Key Questions

  • How much server demand would such an API produce?
  • Is the current metadata (categories, principally) complete and detailed enough to produce useful search results of the sort which can be found through the Flickr API?

Potential Costs

  • Server demand
  • Dealing with malicious or inappropriate metadata contributions
  • Handling abusive consumers could require effort

References



Community Discussion

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