The API wishlist and improvement thread

haavard

What could be done to make the SmugMug API even more awesome? I'm sure there is room for improvement in the existing API and probably some great ideas within the community for upcoming versions as well. For my self, I would very much like to see:

1) images.search and albums.search

2) Buy-link in images.get and images.getURLs

3) Batch buy-link in albums.get and albums.getInfo

4) Image ratio (width/height) in images.get

Please add you suggestions, a developer might pass by and take notice

skim1420

1. smugmug.keywords.getAll (returns list of all keywords)
2. smugmug.images.searchByKeywords (returns all photos that match keywords parameter)
2. smugmug.locations.getAll (returns all photos' imageId/Key and longitude/latitude)

David PL

Here's some thoughts on an effective approach for adding image search capabilities to the API. I think all necessary image search capabilities could simply be incorporated into the current smugmug.images.get method. The great thing about how SmugMug has structured smugmug.images.get is that it is very expandable to include powerful search capabilities. Right now that method already has one parameter that essentially allows for searching for recent photos: LastUpdated.

To expand the search capabilities to really make it powerful, they could just add additional optional search/filter parameters to that method. For example, they could add a Keywords parameter to search for images with a given keyword, a FileName parameter to search on file name, a MD5Sum parameter to search on MD5, a Hidden parameter to search for just hidden/visible images, a Video parameter to search for just videos/non-videos, etc. In this same way, the current AlbumID/Key parameter should also be made into an optional parameter the same way as all the other search parameters so you can decide if you want to only search within a particular album or if you want to search the entire account.

With this design, the user could then combine as many of those optional search parameters however they want. For example, if you just wanted videos after 2010 with the keyword "vacation", you would just specify in your call to smugmug.images.get: Video=1&Keywords=vacation&LastUpdated=2011-01-01 (epoch format though, but you get the idea). That would provide an extremely powerful but at the same time very intuitive interface.

skim1420

I concur!!

David PL wrote: »

Here's some thoughts on an effective approach for adding image search capabilities to the API. I think all necessary image search capabilities could simply be incorporated into the current smugmug.images.get method. The great thing about how SmugMug has structured smugmug.images.get is that it is very expandable to include powerful search capabilities. Right now that method already has one parameter that essentially allows for searching for recent photos: LastUpdated.

To expand the search capabilities to really make it powerful, they could just add additional optional search/filter parameters to that method. For example, they could add a Keywords parameter to search for images with a given keyword, a FileName parameter to search on file name, a MD5Sum parameter to search on MD5, a Hidden parameter to search for just hidden/visible images, a Video parameter to search for just videos/non-videos, etc. In this same way, the current AlbumID/Key parameter should also be made into an optional parameter the same way as all the other search parameters so you can decide if you want to only search within a particular album or if you want to search the entire account.

With this design, the user could then combine as many of those optional search parameters however they want. For example, if you just wanted videos after 2010 with the keyword "vacation", you would just specify in your call to smugmug.images.get: Video=1&Keywords=vacation&LastUpdated=2011-01-01 (epoch format though, but you get the idea). That would provide an extremely powerful but at the same time very intuitive interface.