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Introduction

This tutorial will guide you through creating your own application to display geo-tagged Flickr images on a Bing Maps backdrop in Silverlight 4.

The components

Flickr Web Services

Flickr exposes a variety of services to access their database of public images, in REST (see this article), SOAP (read here) and RPC (here) formats. For more details, go to their API documentation. A detailed explanation of accessing RESTful services is outside the scope of this article, but, in essence is involves generating a url, downloading the result as a string (the Flickr REST service returns an XML file), and then parsing it to get the info we want.

My fiancée has this blog where she blogs about our new life in NZ. And this is interesting to you because…? Well, it isn’t, but it is the reason for this blog post as well as a few more coming soon. On her blog, she posts pictures. These pictures are taken by her or me by a camera with several megapixels. That makes them too big for her blog. So she has to resize them before uploading them. This takes time and is annoying. So I offered to solve it in a somewhat more modern way. By using flickr. So she will upload her images to flickr and then use a little Silverlight application to show them on her blog. So that’s where this blog post is about…the flickrVIEWR…

This was really a “just for fun” thing that I started because I was stuck in a hotel the other night ( hotel rooms are great for writing code ) and I wanted to play with using the PlaneProjection in Silverlight 3 to produce a flip effect and I ended up writing a very basic client for FlickR so I thought I’d share it here.

The flip effect I was looking for was one where I had a rectangle painted with an image and then it flips over to display a different image from the back.