A while ago I thought it might be interesting to be able to search Flickr and organise the results by the month that the photos were taken. Over the last couple of days I’ve made the system a little better. The page searches my Flickr photos and displays them in the months they were taken.
I’ve changed the default search to butterfly as I am taking quite a lot of photos of them at the moment. It is potentially useful to be able to see what to expect at different times of the year. The page takes a parameter of t to display a different search:
https://johnjohnston.info/flickrcal/?t=bird
The main change I made was to add some caching, getting the results of a Flickr search can be slow, so this speeds up repeated searches. I also made the sorting a bit more logical. The display of thumbnails is basic and they just link back to Flickr. I might think of making them look a little better maybe opening a lightbox? I also hope to deal with results of > 500 where I would need more than one call to the Flickr api.
This fits very well with my approach to photography. I think of my photos like a diary rather than great photos. I am still shooting auto 99% of the time. I enjoy looking back at pictures in the same way as I like reading old blog posts. I also think it could become more useful over the yeas in letting me know what to look out for.
I also wonder if I could use the same idea for a search of everyone’s photos using a bounding box to limit the area.
The featured image is of a specked wood, my current favourite butterfly.
@johnjohnston Do you know about NB Davies’ study of the speckled wood’s territorial behaviour? A classic.
@jeremycherfas I did not. I’ve read the abstract now. I have found that if one is scared off, it often returns to the same sunlit leaf or log quite quickly. I don’t think I’d noticed them often until recently. Their flight through sun dappled woods is delightful.
@johnjohnston So interesting. A classmate of mine. Went on to write the book on behavioral ecology, literally.
@jeremycherfas looking at his profile. I had recently read about the dunock research in the YouTube video. Quite amazing & bizarre sex life.
@johnjohnston what I love about Nick’s work is that patient observation and simple experiments not far from home led him to such interesting ideas.