Totally experimental (think of this as an ‘alpha’ release!) so forgive me if it’s either not working or you have problems with it, but below you’ll find a first attempt to get a timeline of Flickr Commons images online. As a bit of a plug, this is derived from work I have been doing for my dedicated Dated Vintage Photographs group on Flickr. For that, and potentially here, I plan to add options where end users can restrict images by date range, tag, search query, Flickr user (or in this case institution), etc etc. It doesn’t look great in this confined blog post, so open it up full-screen for the best experience. All feedback and suggestions welcome!
Two current caveats:
- to keep the search within reason (extracting from 11,000 image records and nearly 1MB file size felt large enough!) it only represents images taken up to the end of 1899 and also excludes images with estimated (‘circa’) dates;
- and to help with performance (and minimise any downtime from errors fetching the data in ‘real time’) this version is using a static snapshot of images as at 17 January 2011.
PS I am happy for anyone to embed this in their own website – just use http://www.whatsthatpicture.com/flickr/timeline-commons.htm – and also to share the source code (especially to anyone who wants to help improve it).