When I saw this ask metafilter question (“Online Photo Gallery”), I was inspired to write a web-app that would display photos from one of the photo hosting sites (flickr, google photos, etc) as a simple slideshow.

It turns out that flickr has an api that lends itself well to this job . Using the flickr api I can retrieve all the information I need to display a list of photos published by a given user (optionally limited to one album) . This includes the description of the photo saved in flickr that I can use as a photo caption.

My language of choice for this task was Elm. Using the decoder functionality that comes with Elm, it’s easy to work with rest api calls that return JSON data. I used Evan Czaplicki’s url-parser library to read flickr user and album names as routing parameters in the URL.

The web-app is published on github. I created a flickr user: “dave20477” for demo purposes so clicking on this link …

https://dc25.github.io/askMetaGallery/#/dave20477

… will initiate a slideshow that lets you view all the public photos published by “dave20477” .

and clicking on this link …

https://dc25.github.io/askMetaGallery/#/dave20477/album_for_metafilter

… will initiate a slideshow that lets you view all the public photos in the album “album_for_metafilter” belonging to “dave20477”

The content produced by these pages is intended to work well with html inlining so these slideshows can be embedded in a web page as shown below.

The source code for this web-app is published on github.