Integration of Flickr in Phimpme Android

Flickr is very widely used photo sharing website. So, we added a functionality in Phimpme Android to share the image to Flickr. Using this feature, the user can upload a picture to Flickr, without leaving the application with a single click. The way how we implemented this Flickr in our Phimpme Android application is shown below.

Setting up Flickr API

Flickr provides only an official web API. So we used the flickrj-android library built using the official Flickr API. First of all, we created an application in Flickr App Garden and requested API tokens from here. We noted down the resultant API key and secret key. These keys are necessary for authenticating Flickr in the application.

Steps for Authentication

Establishing the authentication with Flickr requires the following steps as per the official documentation.

  • Getting a request token
  • Getting User Authorization
  • Exchanging the Request Token for an Access Token
  • Use the Access Token with up.flickr.com/services/upload/ to upload pictures.

Authorizing the user of Flickr in Phimpme

As shown in the above picture, a request token has to be generated. Flickrj SDK provides it for us using Flickr object which further is created using the API key and Secret key. This request token is used for directing the user to a page for manually authorizing the Phimpme application to share the picture to his/her Flickr account. In Phimpme Android application, we created the Flickr object as shown below.

Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST());
OAuthToken oauthToken = f.getOAuthInterface().getRequestToken(
     OAUTH_CALLBACK_URI.toString());
saveTokenSecrent(oauthToken.getOauthTokenSecret());
URL oauthUrl = f.getOAuthInterface().buildAuthenticationUrl(
     Permission.WRITE, oauthToken);

Getting Access Token

After the manual authorization of the application, Flickr returns the OAuth token and OAuth verifier. These have to used for making another request to Flickr for getting the “Access Token” which gives us the access to upload the picture to Flickr account. For implementing this, intent data is collected when the application reopens after manual authorization. This data contains the OAuth token and OAuth verifier. These are passed to get Access Token from functions present Flickrj library. In Phimpme Android, we implemented this in following way.

Uri uri = intent.getData();
String query = uri.getQuery();
String[] data = query.split("&");
if (data != null && data.length == 2) {
  String oauthToken = data[0].substring(data[0].indexOf("=") + 1);
  String oauthVerifier = data[1].substring(data[1].indexOf("=") + 1);
  OAuth oauth = getOAuthToken();
  if (oauth != null && oauth.getToken() != null && oauth.getToken().getOauthTokenSecret() != null) {
  Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST());
  OAuthInterface oauthApi = null;
  if (f != null) {
     oauthApi = f.getOAuthInterface();
     return oauthApi.getAccessToken(oauthToken, oauthTokenSecret,verifier);}
  }
}

Uploading Image to Flickr

As we got the Access Token, we used that for creating new Flickr Object. The upload function present in the API requires three arguments – a file name, input stream and its metadata. The input stream is generated using the ContentResolver present in the Android. The code showing how we implemented uploading to Flickr is shown below.

Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST());
RequestContext requestContext = RequestContext.getRequestContext();
OAuth auth = new OAuth();
auth.setToken(new OAuthToken(token, secret));
requestContext.setOAuth(auth);
UploadMetaData uploadMetaData = new UploadMetaData();
uploadMetaData.setTitle(your file name);
InputStream is = getContentResolver().openInputStream(Uri.fromFile(your file object));
f.getUploader().upload(your file name, is, uploadMetaData);

The full implementation, using AsyncTasks and other well-optimized functions, is available in our Phimpme Android project repo on GitHub.

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