If you're anything like me, you've leveraged all the great plugins and code examples that the Flickr community has made available for more than five years. We use Flickr to allow for easy end-user photo management while pulling filtered photo sets into a seamless website photo gallery using jQuery.
Last week, I started receiving reports that our Flickr galleries, which number in the dozens, were no longer working. Now what?
My initial thought was to blame Yahoo! Sure, this seems like a straight forward approach if your thought process starts with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer divesting the photo sharing site to make room for an Animated Gif service to go head to head with Twitter Inc.'s Vine.com (which would be awesome). Looking into the issue further, it seemed that no such Animated Gif startup had been acquired by Yahoo as of yet and maybe I need to rethink this.
My concerns were finally put to rest after coming to my senses and taking a quick look through the API documentation over at https://www.flickr.com/services/api/ .
As it turns out, the API is still working and nothing major has changed, however using SSL is now a requirement. So fixing your broken galleries is as simple as changing all references to the API URL:
from: http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/
to: https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/
I will put away my jump to conclusions mat for now but keep it handy for next time 🙂