I am very pleased to announce the first alpha-release of the Flickr-Plugin for Canola, current features are the following:

• Display the users photosets, favorites and images which are not part of any set
• Search for images with specific tags in the users images
• Display the contacts of the user, their photosets and of course the images in their photosets
• Display the latest 20 images of the most interesing images on Flickr
• Display the groups you and your contacts are in and the images which are contained in the corresponding group pools, limited the the 20 latest ones.

A few screenshots show how it looks like and what is new compared to my first pre-announcement of the plugin.

The list of known problems are the following:

• The image files are cached locally (in your specified download-folder of Canola), this cache grow to a very big size, depending on how many images you view (the plugin does not download full sized images yet, for speed reasons, it just tries to fetch images with match the screen-resolution best, which in most cases will be the “Large” Size of the Flickr-image)
• Canola sometimes tends to crash when viewing images, it happens only on the tablets, not in the development-version of Canola, so i could not yet reproduce and fix the problem
• It is currently not possible to delete the user-credentials and change to another Flickr-User, if you wish to do this, you should stop Canola, delete /home/user/.flickr and start Canola again

So after you have read though this, you migth want to know where to get the plugin:

It is should be available in the extras-devel-repositories for Diablo and Chinook, but unfortunaely i was hit by bug #3549. Because of this, i created a temporary repository, where you can install the plugin from, this repository will be removed, as soon as the bug with the autobuilder is fixed.

Please report back what you think about the plugin, if it works for you, ideas and everything else. I have just started a new thread on ITT, it can be found here: <add url here> . I am also still in Berlin at the Maemo Summit, please contact me directly, for those of you who do not know me (probably most of you), it am wearing a black Debian T-Shirt, with a big red Debian swirl on the front.

My TODO-List for the plugin already contains a number of items, here is a short excerpt:

• Rowrenderer similiar to the youtube-plugin to show thumbnails+meta-information
• Meta-Information of the image in the context-menu of the image-viewer, similar to the youtube-plugin
• Option to download the Original-Sized-Image in the context-menu
• Option to switch to another flickr-user in the Settings-Menu
• Option to delete/cleanup the image-cache in the Settings-Menu
• Thumbnail-View of the images similar to the local image-browser
• Extend the Contacts-menu with photos not in a set or with photostream option

Just for the curious: the source-code is available under http://git.geekbu.de/?p=canola-flickr.git, you can also fetch it with:

git clone git://git.geekbu.de/canola-flickr.git

btw: Please do not blame the Canola Developers for bugs caused by this plugin, i am not related to them, and it was probably me who caused a bug which you are experiencing (especially if your Canola tends to crash while using the plugin).

The only thing you could blame them for is the missing api-documentation of Canola, but as i just hear in Handful’s talk, this should not be a problem anymore soon, when Canola will be fully open-sourced. 😉

This is actually a modified version of the first draft of the announcement, where i wanted to announce version 0.0.1 of canola-flickr, but unfortunately i was hit by bug #3549 with the autobuilders when i tried to upload the first version, about 6 weeks ago.