Flickr ICONCLASSify

You say potato, I say solanum tuberosum

Winner: "Best International Hack" at the Yahoo/BBC Hackday London 2007

A Greasemonkey script to add ICONCLASS functionality to Flickr.

But what does it do?

One of the key selling points of the ICONCLASS system is that it is multi-lingual. The system is available in English, German, French, Italian with partial translations to Dutch, Norwegian and Finnish in progress. Terms are arranged hierarchically from broad terms at the top, getting more specific as you descend 'down' the tree. The system consists of circa 2 million nodes, each node has descriptive text in the languages mentioned above, relevant keywords and cross-references to other nodes in the tree where necessary. Each node is uniquely idenitifed with an alpha-numeric 'notation'.

This hack makes it easy to assign the alphanumeric ICONCLASS codes to Flickr images as machine tags, and then display the textual meaning of that code in one of several languages.

Getting Started

First step is to make sure that you are running the Firefox webbrowser. Then install the Greasemonkey extension to Firefox. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function. Then download and install the ICONCLASSify script, and visit a Flickr photo page. If the script is working correctly, you should see an extra link under the photo browser section: ICONCLASSify.

If there are machine tags assigned to a photo, expand the machine tags by clicking on the little triangle, and a box should be displayed translating the ICONCLASS codes into human-readable text. The links above the text allows the translation of the tags into the chosen language.

By clicking the ICONCLASSify link, you are taken to a search page from where you can find tags to assign to the photo. Type some words into the 'Full-text search box' and a list of suggested notations to use is displayed. By clicking on a suggestion it is copied to the tag box, and by clicking on the 'Add tag' link it is added to the Photo on Flickr.

It doesn't work for me!

At the moment you need to have your Flickr account set to allwo tags from anybody. Here is a blog post explaining how to do that, and some background information on allowing others to tag your photos.

Important Note:

As this is a hack done under pressure, with little sleep, there are some things not finished. Among other things, the authentication to enable you to add tags to your own photos is not properly done yet, and you can only tag photos which allow publig tags. As soon as the server-side has been updated to do proper authentication this notice will be updated.

For more information:

Etienne Posthumus - etienne@mnemosyne.org
Mnemosyne
WG Plein 320
1054 SG Amsterdam
tel: +31 20 616 1039
    

Thanks

To all the amazing people who write wonderful software, and share their ideas/code/enthusiasm and love for things nifty. And to my family for letting me escape to London to go hacking.