A while ago (March 13th), flickr launched so called collections (read the flickr blog entry). Collections serve as container to group sets or collections together. This way, you can organize sets or collections of a certain context that may be spread over a long period of time. You can build a hierarchy as deep as 5 collections.

Administering collections seamlessly works in the organizr including the creation of a mosaik made from your thumbnails. With this comes the ability to change the layout of your flickr home page to display either small or medium size versions of your photos together with collections or sets at the side. As I read, this is limited to flickr PRO users only. Which would make sense, since non-PRO accounts will most likely not have that much content to be organized.

While I’m using phpflickr to access my photos for displaying them on my web site, the obvious question was: When will I be able to use flickr collections on my web site? Looking at the API services page doesn’t reveal any changes in the flickr API towards collections yet. Dan Coulter meanwhile dropped the question regarding the planned time frame and got the following response from flickr:

Probably months. Could be sooner, but we have a whole lot of higher priority things going on right now, and before we release the APIs for collections there are some changes we need to make to how collections work (we’re changing them to handle mixed content). We definitely know there is developer interest in the collection APIs, so we’ll get to it as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience

Read the posting in his blog.

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