Variety

Are there any future plans to add support for more image sources?

Asked by Bradley Ansell

Flickr is nice, but I was hoping to see a few more sources available. Perhaps imgur, Picasa, deviantArt and maybe even Google Image Search.

What would be really cool is a "custom" option, where you can specify your own URL strings with a variable, like using %i to denote where the image filename would be in the URL, or %s for a search string. Of course, as sites tend to change now and then, this would require a bit of manual upkeep, but it would be nice to have so we can specify our own sources, no matter how obscure or unpopular they might be.

Thank you very much for this program, I'm having a wonderful time with it!

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Peter Levi
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Best Peter Levi (peterlevi) said : 		#1

Imgur, Picasa and deviantArt are all available via the MediaRSS source option (not tested recently though):

Imgur: https://answers.launchpad.net/variety/+question/238525
DeviantART: https://www.deviantart.com/developers/rss gives you information how to obtain the RSS links.
Picasa: Look for the RSS links while browsing https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/featured?feat=featured_all. E.g. https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/featured?alt=rss&kind=photo&access=public&slabel=featured&imgmax=1600&hl=bg

Google's Search API is paid and expensive, so no chance there.

It is possible to use Yahoo Pipes or https://github.com/goodevilgenius/mediarss-maker to get Media RSS feeds for some other sources too, e.g. from this RSS with Bing images: http://feeds.feedburner.com/bingimages

At some point in the future Variety will probably support plugins for image downloading, this is the only decent way to support "own" sources. Not soon though.

Regards,
Peter

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Bradley Ansell (bdansell) said : 		#2

Wow! I had no idea the MediaRSS feature was so flexible, thank you very much!

I had no idea Google was charging for their API. I completely understand not being able to include support for it, and I can do without it even more easily, now knowing this. The more free and open, the better :).

I'll mark this solved. Thanks for getting back to me so soon.

By the way, I've been receiving several wallpapers from your Flickr that's on the default settings, and I just wanted to say I think your photographs are absolutely beautiful. I've kept several of them in my Favourites.

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Bradley Ansell (bdansell) said : 		#3

Thanks Peter Levi, that solved my question.