As usual I’ve made a pummelvision style video:
The featured image is a montage of the same photos and here is an average:
Because I’ve now got a local database of my flickr photos it was easy to get all my tags of the year and make a wordcloud.
And a slitscan (or a sort, given these are separate still images):
I am pretty pleased with On this Flickr Day and already find it fascinating to see photos from the same day across the years.
I left this with a few todos and have made progress.
json_encode($data,JSON_PRETTY_PRINT); for php. That could be fetched with JavaScript from my new index page.I’ve continued to talk to claude.ai a bit in the process. But I’ve been careful to ask for it to discuss approaches & not give me code. I’ve tried to describe my ideas and situation and finish with Can you run through some options & idea, without code? or similar. This has been really helpful. I continue to search for answers to problems with DuckDuckGo too as in the pre ai days.
On This Flickr Day There is a bit more work on making this look nice, but it is a start.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. A way to show Flickr photos taken “on this day”.
I’ve used the Flickr API occasionally over the years, but calling it directly would take too much time. You would need to page through all the photos 500 at a time until you had all the photos.
So I thought I might build a personal database with the information I needed. This could be updated weekly. I then could pull the information from that in one go. Especially if I store the days and months individually for each photo.
This is somewhat outside my skill set. I’ve used the Flickr Api but do not really know much about databases. In the dim past I think I’ve created them once or twice and used from PHP but with lots of searching.
I planned:
I’ve got some way toward that. I did need a bit of help from claude.ai to get the bash sorted. I’ve just used simple PHP on the webpage so far and managed that with the odd search when I’ve hit an error.
I’ve been thinking a bit about using AI for this sort of thing. My current approach is to use it for specific questions. For example, asking is this a sensible approach, or asking for hep with a line. Rather than write me a whole script to do x, y or z. So I start a script then ask for help when stuck. In the same way I’d have to look up docs or search for the answer to a problem.
Hopefully my next step will be to, after a short interval, go through any files and comment as to what is going on to reinforce my learning.
As I am a complete amateur and do not have anyone to chat about this with, I find using AI quite good fun if I make sure to tell it not to give me whole solutions.
The other thing I’ve been trying with AI is to run any files through asking for them to give any security recommendations.
A quick video of photos I’ve uploaded to flickr this summer. Made with this script.
Likes Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable by .
Thankfully, Flickr, the website from which I took the image, has a handy feature that allows you to see the license history of an image
I didn’t know about the flickr license history. Neat!
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.
I started this two weeks ago when I went back to school. So past time for a summer recap:
As usual I took some photos, and I’ve strung them together, pummelvision fashion.
I updated the script a bit to fade the audio and added a gentler audio choice.
I’ve continued trying to write one note a day on ‘something natural’ and recording each months notes.
This summer has certainly not been good on the weather front, the tail end of a bug which seemed to take a long time to go away also slowed me down for most of July. Although I walked around a fair bit very locally (Kilpatrick Hills, Cochno etc). I didn’t add much to the walk list. I still managed to see a few new things (at least to photograph).
I continued working one day a week on Glow Blogs. There was a release (Glow Blogs Update 14 Aug 2024), just after the schools returned. I spent a fair bit of time writing and updating the various sites that comprise the help system. Checking things out and spending a lot more time in the Block Editor. Lots more to come on that front. I feel the use of blogs in teaching has decreased a bit but I believe they can still be useful in lots of different ways.
I’ve continued to use my blog (syndicated to mastodon & Bluesky via micro.blog) instead of X. I noticed a fresh flush of twitter educators coming through to Bluesky after Musk’s support for the extreme right in the UK.
I did a few The DS106 Daily Creates, but less than usual, my favourites were #tdc4584 &
TDC 5491.
I dodged away at a personal Flickr search page, Search Flickr – Results by Month, as I like comparing things I’ve seen throughout the year organised by month. I’ve already something similar for this blog.
As someone with an interest in natural history, I often look forward to seasonal occurrences, the first cuckoo or blackthorn blossom.
I also keep track of some of these things here on my blog and on Flickr. I find searching both places useful for all sorts of reasons, but not for figuring out what to expect or remembering when I’ve heard the first cuckoo.
A while back I, sort of solved the problem here by making a page that allows me to search the blog and order the results by the date without the years.
I’ve been playing about with Flickr searches in the same way and now have a simple page which searches for a tag and order the page by months, ignoring the years. The page loads the tag flora by default. If you give it a t parameter, it will search for that instead: ?t=butterfly. I’ve also brefly tested a u parameter for username. This needs to be a user’s NSID (71428177@N00 not troutcolor), it defaults to mine.
It also also loads the first 500 images, which is a bridge I’ll need to cross for some tags soon.
Update, 22 Aug 2025, I’ve improved this somewhat and moved it here: Flickr By Month. Defaults to butterflies now.
As has become custom I’ve made a video of my years flickr photos. I edited the script a little to use larger images & added a different sound track.
Loch Ardinning – British Dragonfly Society
I’ve visited the loch and the The British Dragonfly site many times. Never this page. Quite delighted to see that the header photo is mine. I presumed picked up from Flickr.