For those of you who don’t already know about flickr.rb, you’ve got to check it out. It’s an insanely simple library that’s going to help you get that Flickr/Google Maps/Yahoo!/Craigslist/Hostess Twinkie mash-up you’ve always dreamed about off the ground.

As a quick example, let’s just say you wanted to create a minimal Flickr photostream, just for fun. You want to grab all the public Flickr photos tagged “dog”, and show them randomly on a page via AJAX, and maybe do a little script.aculo.us fade in and out.

First, gem install flickr. Great, now that’s over with.

The controller:

require 'flickr'

class PhotoController < ApplicationController
    def show
        get_image
    end

    def photo
        get_image
        render :partial => 'photo'
    end

    def get_image
        flickr = Flickr.new
        @photos = flickr.tag('dog')
        @img = @photos[rand(@photos.length)]
    end
end

The view:

<div id="the_image">
    <%= render :partial => 'photo' %>
    <%= periodically_call_remote(
        :update => "the_image", 
        :url => {:action => "photo"},
        :loading => "new Effect.Fade('the_image')",
        :complete => "new Effect.Appear('the_image')") %>
</div>

The partial:

<h3><%= @img.title %></h3>
<p><%= @img.description %></p>
<p><%= image_tag(@img.source) %></p>

Clearly, we could optimize this by throwing all the photo data into a database, so that we don’t have to make the API call with every request. And of course, you can do other, more complex things with flickr.rb, like grabbing photos by user/tag/recently added/related tags, etc.

There’s a Flickr API wrapper for .NET, too. Anybody want to re-create this example with ASP.NET so we can compare?