search photos by tags all & any collabo

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From: yws-flickr@yahoogroups.com [mailto:yws-flickr@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Ben Shepherd
Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 12:43 AM
To: yws-flickr@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [yws-flickr] search photos by tags all & any collabo

No - there's no complex Boolean searching like that as far as I know. But it would be fairly easy to implement at the client end, surely? Just get your list of photoIDs for 'party', 'thomas' and 'tim' separately, then apply your AND/OR logic to the IDs that are found in both lists.

Hope that makes sense - it's quite early over here

ben

On 6/17/06, simonvanherweghe <gmail.com"> simon.vanherweghegmail.com> wrote:

Hi,
How can I (is there a way to) make a search like this:
'party AND thomas OR tim'

I can perform a search like that directly in the search field from
flickr.com, but when I use it by the api, it fails... It seems like I
can only use one option at the time (please say it isnt)

I've read something about using commas and spaces with the tag_mode
set like 'any', but that doesn't seem to work

> If we're lucky, Flickr's own Eric Costello will pipe up with a tip on how to do it!

I wasn't too clear on it myself, but I asked Dathan and got the skinny:

Boolean tag searches are not currently supported, officially**. BUT...

* Boolean text searches via flickr.photos.search are supported, with
AND (+), OR, and NOT (-) operators.
* ()'s can be used for nested logic.
* Quotations can be used for phrase searches.
* Default behavior is too split the query on spaces outside of quotes
and perform an AND query (so [Esther Hope] is the equivalent of
[Esther AND hope])

Some examples, which do what you think they'd do:
Esther OR Hope
&quot;Esther smiling&quot; AND Hope
(Esther OR Hope) AND smiling

(Remember, text search searches against title, desc, and tags, tag
search searches against only tags).

** Though I did just commit some changes that will let you play with
boolean tag search: just use tag_mode=bool (which is undocumented),
and instead of a passing a comma delimited string in the tag param,
just pass in your boolean query.

CAVEAT: undocumented stuff is undocumented because it may change in the future.

Eric

On 6/19/06, Stewart Butterfield <stewartbyahoo-inc.com> wrote:
&gt;
>
&gt;
> There actually is the capability of doing complex boolean searches through the API. However, because the spec for the method was written before that capability existed, it's not all that obvious from the docs.
>;
> If we're lucky, Flickr's own Eric Costello will pipe up with a tip on how to do it!
>
>
>
> ________________________________
From: yws-flickryahoogroups.com
[mailto:yws-flickryahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Ben Shepherd
> Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 12:43 AM
> To: yws-flickryahoogroups.com
&gt; Subject: Re: [yws-flickr] search photos by tags all & any collabo
&gt;
>
>
>
>
>
> No - there's no complex Boolean searching like that as far as I know. But it would be fairly easy to implement at the client end, surely? Just get your list of photoIDs for 'party', 'thomas' and 'tim' separately, then apply your AND/OR logic to the IDs that are found in both lists.
&gt;
> Hope that makes sense - it's quite early over here
>
&gt; ben
>
>
> On 6/17/06, simonvanherweghe < simon.vanherweghegmail.com> wrote:
&gt; >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Hi,
> > How can I (is there a way to) make a search like this:
>; > 'party AND thomas OR tim'
> >
> > I can perform a search like that directly in the search field from
> > flickr.com, but when I use it by the api, it fails... It seems like I
> > can only use one option at the time (please say it isnt)
>; >
> > I've read something about using commas and spaces with the tag_mode
> > set like 'any', but that doesn't seem to work
> >
> >
>
>
>;
>
&gt;
>
&gt;
>
>

--
Eric Costello