Flickr Baby Photo Clogs up the Tubes
Well, not all of them, but some. Two days ago all my Flickr importing tools mysteriously stopped working. At first I thought perhaps my Pro account had expired, but it turns out the problem was much more mundane. Since there are others out there that may well be scratching their heads, here’s your answer: Flickr reached the 2147483647 photo milestone earlier this week.
A gold star for those that recognize that number — don’t worry if you don’t, I didn’t either. It turns out that 2147483647 is the upper limit for signed integer data types. Thus if you’re using an open source library like Phlickr or similar to communicate with Flickr’s API, the photo IDs returned will simply disappear.
In my case I was storing Flickr IDs as PostgreSQL integers, which caused a similar problem since that’s the ceiling for PostgreSQL integers.
The solution is store Flickr photo ids as strings, which, despite sounding somewhat counter-intuitive, is actually what the Flickr API documentation has always recommended:
The Flickr API exposes identifiers for users, photos, photosets and other uniquely identifiable objects. These IDs should always be treated as opaque strings, rather than integers of any specific type. The format of the IDs can change over time, so relying on the current format may cause you problems in the future.
There’s a good chance your favorite Flickr API library has already been updated, so now would be a good time to download the latest copy and adjust your personal scripts accordingly.
[via Driftr]
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