Use Flickr? Search Smartly!

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Many of you must use Flickr to find images for your blog posts, right? And many of you use the traditional method (explain that in a minute) of searching for pictures, right?

Image Source: Me!

Well, what if I told you of a method which could reduce your searching time by almost 50%? Read on! You’ll be able to get the perfect picture with only one line of code!

The Traditional Method

The traditional method of searching on Flickr goes something like this:

1. Navigate to www.flickr.com
2. Getting distracted by other pictures.
3. Realizing 15 minutes later what you had come here to do and kicking your self.
4. Typing in your search terms in the search box.
5. Select whether to search tags or your full phrase.
6. Press the search button.

The above steps are not the only ones most people have to take. The number of steps and wait time depends heavily on many factors, such as internet speed, relevancy of the results, etc. All this can result in an unsatisfied you even after a long time of searching

Now, the smart person’s way of searching.

The Smart Method

This method, though a little confusing

and geek-oriented, is really, really fast and to-the-point. In fact, some of the geeky bloggers might have discovered it and been using it since Flickr’s creation! And best of all, you don’t even have to visit the Flickr homepage to search! Ain’t that awesome? Keep reading!

Suppose I want to search for images related to ‘creative minds‘. The normal method to do it is to type in the terms ‘creative minds’ into a search box anywhere on Flickr. When you press the search button and are taken to the results page, notice the address of the results page. It looks some thing like this:

Don’t get confused just yet! Once you concentrate, it’s all very easy. Now, did you notice that just after the letter ‘q‘ (for query) is the phrase you searched for? Note that the addition sign (+) between the two words just signifies a space between the words. (Some times, it’s also represented by this weird phrase: %20. In the case of Flickr, it means the same).

Now, this is the first trick that you learn. Suppose some other time you want to search for images related to ‘boots’. Now, what if you just replace the creative+minds stuff above with boots? And there you go! Without even going to a Flickr search box (or even Flickr.com!) you got your desired results. How awesome is that! Wait: there’s even more tricks to come!

Note: You just have to replace the text and paste the whole thing in the address bar of a browser, like so:

The Very Basic Thing You Gotta Learn

The very basic thing that you have to learn up or bookmark is the following:

That’s the basic search function without any of the frills and extras. Just remember that the ‘q’ variable holds the search terms. Also note that just after the forward slash (/), you have to use a question mark (?) to define the first attribute, and then use ampersands (&) to define others. Like so:

Pimp it Up

Now it’s time to pimp up our search results by adding in more variables. Let’s begin with the creative common licenses.

Creative Common Licenses

As you might already know, all the photos on Flickr are covered by a creative commons license. These licenses govern how you may use these pictures. In total, there are 6 licenses, and there’s a unique attribute for each of them that shows up in the address of the search results.

The attribute I’m talking about is ‘l‘ (for license). Here’s the possible possibilities:

1. l=1 - Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike License;
2. l=2 - Attribution-Non Commercial License;
3. l=3 - Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs License;
4. l=4 - Attribution License;
5. l=5 - Attribution-Share Alike License; and,
6. l=6 - Attribution-NoDerivs License.

So, suppose I want to search for a picture related to ‘creative minds’ with the Attribution License (l=4). Here’s the code I’ll put in the address bar of my browser:

Notice the l=4 in bold? That means that I’m searching for a photo related to ‘creative minds’ and with the Attribution License

Full Text or Tags?

Flickr allows you to either search for photos tagged with the search terms or do a normal search. That option can be chosen just under the search box (on the search page). We have a shortcut for that too. And it’s called ‘m‘ (for method, I presume). There are two choices you can use:

1. m=tags - To search for photos tagged with your search keywords; and,
2. m=text - Search the normal way.

Note that if you don’t specify the ‘m’ attribute, the normal method of searching will be used.

Type: Thumbnail or Details

Normally, Flickr shows photos in the ‘details’ mode. However, if you have a slow internet connection or you would just like to quickly scan through the pictures, you can choose the thumbnails mode. There’s a shortcut for that too! The attribute here is ‘z‘. There’s only one option here as the default one is the ‘details’ option:

• z=t - Show the pictures as thumbnails.

Suppose I’m searching for pictures related to ‘creative minds’ but only want to see thumbnails. Here’s the code I would use:

Notice the z=t in bold there.

View Type

Flickr also allows you to view the result pictures by three categories: Most Relevant, Most Recent, and Most Interesting. There’s a shortcut attribute for that too: ‘s‘. We have two choices here (’Most Relevant’ is the default):

1. s=rec - Display photos in decreasing order of the date (The most recent ones being the first)
2. s=int - Display photos in order of how interesting they are. Interesting-ness is determined by various factors, such as the number of comments a particular photo receives.

Page Number

Sometimes, for some strange reason, you might want to view a particular page of the results, say page 5 instead of page 1. You can do that too with the page=n attribute where n is the page number :

Restrict to a particular date

In Flickr’s advanced search options, I noticed an option which allows you to restrict your search to photographs taken within a particular date period. There’s an attribute for that also, though it’s more advanced than the other ones: d=taken-yyyymmdd-yyyymmdd. Don’t get confused by it just yet. The former set of yyyymmdd is the start date of your required date period. The latter set of yyyymmdd is the end period. For example, the following code will return all the pictures which were taken between the 1st of January 2002 and 1st of January 2008:

Further, you can also search for photos posted between a certain period. There is a difference between posted and taken, mind you. The code is the same as for the ‘taken’ type, but with a small difference: d=posted-yyyymmdd-yyyymmdd. In this, just the ‘taken’ is replaced with ‘posted’ :).

Note: If you keep the the end and start dates the same, you’ll get the results for that one day only (shrug).

View as Slideshow

This is another option in Flickr which allows you to view the photos as a slideshow. You can set your restrictions, though and only these pictures will be shown in the slideshow. For the slideshow option, just add this right after the ‘/search/’ : show/. It’ll end up looking something like this:

And That’s It!

Using the above techniques, you can find the perfect picture in as little as one step! Now think of the time that you’ve saved your self in distractions and unsatisfying results. I myself was also like you, searching the hard and longer way. But then I started to notice that there were specific attributes and values assigned to different features, and thus I started using them!

I knew that many of you might not have known of such a quick and dirty method to search Flickr, therefore I thought why not publish these tips here?

NOTE: The above is by NO MEANS a complete list of all the Flickr search tricks you can use. There are literally hundreds of them which, if used in the proper combination, can get you the ideal picture. As I keep knowing about more tips, I will be updating this post. So stay tuned!

And oh, please do tell me (and the rest of us) any tips you use to search Flickr, our favorite photo sharing service!