Python Flickr-api Blank Response

Question

I am trying to use the Python FlickrAPI package to manage some of my photos in Flickr. I am having difficulty getting certain functions to work properly. I start with the following:

import flickrapi
api_key='###MYkeyHERE###'
api_secret'####MYsecretHERE###'

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key,secret=api_secret)

I also ran the token authentication and check on my Flickr account page to make sure it worked

(token, frob) = flickr.get_token_part_one(perms='write')
flickr.get_token_part_two((token, frob))

When I run the following to get a list of my sets it returns what appears to be an empty response.

photos = flickr.photos_search(user_id='MYuser@id', per_page='10')

The response simply looks like:

<Element 'rsp' at 0x22c2e10>

It has an attribute of 'stat' which is set to OK. I am wondering how to actually see the list of sets.

Funny thing is that the following code works perfectly and prints the names of the photos in one of my sets:

for photo in flickr.walk_set('72157636771398243'):
    print photo.get('title')

This leads me to think that my authentications are working properly, but that I am making some other error. I'd greatly appreciate help.

Answer 1

I don't think you're using it wrong. Look at the example response on the Flickr API flickr.photos.search documentation page .

<photos page="2" pages="89" perpage="10" total="881">
    <photo id="2636" owner="47058503995@N01" 
            secret="a123456" server="2" title="test_04"
            ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" />
    <photo id="2635" owner="47058503995@N01"
            secret="b123456" server="2" title="test_03"
            ispublic="0" isfriend="1" isfamily="1" />
    <photo id="2633" owner="47058503995@N01"
            secret="c123456" server="2" title="test_01"
            ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" />
    <photo id="2610" owner="12037949754@N01"
            secret="d123456" server="2" title="00_tall"
            ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" />
</photos>

I tried this out out of curiosity and got these results, consistent with manipulating a parsed XML response string:

>>> photos
<Element 'rsp' at 0x2199a10>
>>> photos[0]
<Element 'photos' at 0x2199a30>
>>> photos[0][0]
<Element 'photo' at 0x2199cf0>
>>> photos[0][0].get('id')
'11124140143'
>>> photos[0][0].get('owner')
'62997566@N08'

So I suspect that you are using the API properly, but you may need to experiment a bit to understand how best to use the results.

According to the FlickrAPI documentation , the return value from FlickrAPI calls is an ElementTree . That should help figuring out how to tease apart the contents of the response:

>>> import flickrapi
>>> import xml
>>> api_key = 'my API key'
>>> api_secret = 'my API secret'
>>> flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key,secret=api_secret)
>>> r = flickr.photos_search(user_id='48439369@N00', per_page='10')
>>> xml.etree.ElementTree.dump(r)
<rsp stat="ok">
<photos page="1" pages="376" perpage="10" total="3754">
    <photo farm="8" id="10550639536" isfamily="0" isfriend="0" ispublic="1" owner="48439369@N00" secret="fb5a1b526c" server="7336" title="Morgan and Quinn" />
    <photo farm="3" id="10550684964" isfamily="0" isfriend="0" ispublic="1" owner="48439369@N00" secret="0091541055" server="2840" title="Morgan and Quinn" />
    ...
</photos>
</rsp>
>>> 

The ElementTree class provides more methods for examining a result, iterating through the tree and finding nodes of interest.

Answer 2

I've experience the same problem before that there were no result on my fetch of sets to flickr. What I did was to include the token as parameter in FlickrAPI. Please see below. In this implementation, I'm using a json response from Flickr.

import flickrapi
import simplejson as json

flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(FLICKR_API_KEY, FLICKR_API_SECRET, token='#############', format='json')
sets = flickr.photosets_getList(user_id='##########')
sets = sets.replace('jsonFlickrApi', '').strip('()')
jsets = json.loads( sets )
photoset_group = jsets['photosets']['photoset']
for photoset in photoset_group:
    print photoset