Aggregate photos from various services into one Stream

Question

Helllo All, I'm looking to aggregate photos from various streams into one stream in a similar manner as to friend feed. I'd like to be able to watch flickr and picasa and other sites with RSS feeds of my choosing and then create a timeline of top photos.

For example, assume that X's below are photos:

Event Name -- March 15th
   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   more->

Event Name 2 -- March 12th
   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X    X  more->

Event Name 3 -- February 15th
   X   X   X   X   X   X   X   X    X  more->

etc. It would be nice to also be able to filter based on rankings, etc...

So, I've been searching for APIs/code libraries for PHP/JavaScript (but could also be Python) that would do such an aggregation, but I have yet to find anything. (My search terms probably weren't the best as it's hard to find anything specific when "picasa" and "flickr" are in the search request.)

Any suggestion on some projects that do such a thing? If you've used FriendFeed, you'll know about what I'm looking for.

Thanks.enter code here

Answer 1

Have you checked out Gregarius. It's a PHP tool which you install on your own server which allows you to combine/group RSS feeds.

A group of RSS feeds has its own RSS feed in gregarius. You don't need to look at the frontend you can just use gregarius as backend and use the group RSS feed to visualize your project.

Not sure how to do the ranking with Gregarius.

Answer 2

I suggest using YQL.

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services.

With it you can do things such:

select * from query.multi where queries="select enclosure from rss where url='http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/all?alt=rss&kind=photo&access=public&filter=1&q=Paris&hl=de' LIMIT 5;select * from flickr.photos.search where text='Paris' LIMIT 5"

View Output as XML

With this query you will get the first 5 images from Picasa RSS-Feed and Flickr-Search matching "Paris". (For Flickr you will have to create the link to the image by yourself)

The output format can be either XML, JSON or JSONP-X