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Did you know that the new Front End of www.flickr.com is one big Flickr API client? Writing a client for an existing API or service can be a lot of fun, but decoupling and testing that client can be quite tricky. There are many different approaches to taking the backing service out of the equation when it comes to writing tests for client code. Today we’ll discuss the pros and cons of some of thes

We introduced the justified layout on Flickr.com late in 2011. Our community of photographers loved it for its ability to efficiently display many photos at their native aspect ratio with visually pleasing, consistent whitespace, so we quickly added it to the rest of the website. It’s been through many iterations and optimizations. From back when we were primarily on the PHP stack to our lovely ne

tl;dr: Check it out at parkorbird.flickr.com! We at Flickr are not ones to back down from a challenge. Especially when that challenge comes in webcomic form. And especially when that webcomic is xkcd. So, when we saw this xkcd comic we thought, “we’ve got to do that”: In fact, we already had the technology in place to do these things.  Like the woman in the comic says, determining whether a photo

We recently implemented Redis Sentinel at Flickr to provide automated Redis master failover for an important subsystem and we wanted to share our experience with it. Hopefully, we can provide insight into our experience adopting this relatively new technology and some of the nuances we encountered getting it up and running. Although we try to provide a basic explanation of what Sentinel is and how

Hey, did you notice, on the brand-spanking-new Yahoo homepage, right there on the side of the page, it’s photos from your Flickr contacts (or maybe your groups)! No? Go check it out, I’ll wait. Ok, great, you’re back! What you should have seen, assuming you have Flickr contacts (or are a member of some groups), is photos from your most recently active contact (or group!). Something like… this: (th

Here at Flickr, we’re pretty nerdy. We like to measure stuff. We love measuring stuff. The more stuff we can measure, the better our understanding of how different parts of the website work with each other gets. There are two types of measurement we especially like to do – counting and timing. These exciting activities help us to know what is happening when things break – if a page is taking a lon

What is Exif? A short primer. Exif is short for Exchangeable image file format. A standard that specifies the formats to be used in images, sounds, and tags used by digital still cameras. In this case we are concerned with the tags standard and how it is used in still images. How Flickr currently parses Exif data. Currently we parse an image’s Exif data after it is uploaded to the Flickr servers a

Flickr is somewhat unique in that it uses a code repository with no branches; everything is checked into head, and head is pushed to production several times a day. This works well for bug fixes that we want to go out immediately, but presents a problem when we’re working on a new feature that takes several months to complete. How do we solve that problem? With flags and flippers! Feature Flags Fl

Ever since we launched our Flickr2Twitter beta, developers have been requesting new API methods, so they can support Flickr as a photo sharing option in their Twitter clients. I’ve got good news, and bad news. The bad news is we don’t have any new APIs to offer you. The good news is we shipped our “Twitter APIs” nearly five years ago. Let me explain. Working with Blogs (including Twitter) For as l

We have a lot of geotagged photos Almost ninety million, as I write this, and the numbers keep growing especially as nearly every new smart phone released to market has not only a camera but also the ability to capture location information with it. For every geotagged photo we store up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places

Last week the world celebrated Safer Internet Day, a day used to call upon stakeholders to join together to make the internet a safer and better place for all, and especially for children and young people. Here at Flickr, we believe in creating spaces on the internet that take into account the safety of all of our contributors, especially our youngest and most underrepresented. So, to celebrate th