PhotoFlux for Android is a location-based photo browser application for Google's Android platform running on mobile devices like smart phones. With PhotoFlux for Android you can display geocoded photos from Flickr taken in a certain geographic area by selecting an area of interest on a map and then browsing the corresponding stream (called flux) of photos.
Screenshots
A picture is worth a thousand words. Here, you can see screenshots of the three major screens of PhotoFlux:
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Area of interest selection |
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Image gallery of selected area |
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Large image view |
Version History
- Version 1.1, 2009-05-25
- Display all images in search region ignoring the accuracy level of the image position. This should lead to an exhaustive list of available images in the selected area.
- Version 1.0, 2009-05-24
- Initial release.
Download
You can download PhotoFlux for Android by visiting Android Market with your phone and searching for PhotoFlux.
Legal Notice
PhotoFlux is a free non-commercial application and personal project of Frank Dürr.
PhotoFlux uses the Flickr API but is not endorsed or certified by Flickr. The API is used according to Flickr's terms of use. In particular, every photo is displayed together with the name of the author and the required link to the original photo page at Flickr. However, if you as an author of photos stored at Flickr want your photos to be excluded from PhotoFlux, you can opt-out from being considered by requests through the Flickr API. Please read the official discussion at Flickr for more details on this issue.
The application icon of PhotoFlux shown to the right is based on the great Nuvola Icon Theme by David Vignoni licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Therefore, the icon of PhotoFlux is also licensed under LGPL, and anyone is free to download and use the icon according to this license.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Question: How many photos are displayed per region?
- Answer: Currently, the maximum number of photos per region is limited to 100 for each query to limit the load put onto Flickr's service.
- Question: Why isn't my photo displayed although I know I search in
the right region?
- Answer: Since the number of results returned by a query is limited to 100 currently, PhotoFlux might not display all photos taken in the queried region. Since PhotoFlux displays the most interesting (popular) photos first, unpopular photos might not appear in densely covered areas.
- Question: Why can't I select a very large search area?
- Answer: The maximum radius of a search area is limited to 10 km to reduce the load put onto the Flickr service. Anyway, a very big search radius might not be considered a typical location-based search anymore.
- Question: Why doesn't the gallery view show all photos at once and
keeps downloading photos when I scroll down?
- Answer: This behaviour is a trade-off and implemented this way by intention. On the one hand, I do not want to load a possibly large number of thumbnails in advance although the user might not scroll down until the end of the list. This would mean a waste of bandwidth, which is a scarce resource in mobile networks. Moreover, this would increase the number of unnecessary requests to the Flickr service. Although I do not think this would be a great problem for Flickr, they still might not like such an "aggressive" behaviour. On the other hand, I want to keep the delay experienced by the user to a minimum. Therefore, the user is presented with already download images, while further images are continously downloaded in the background until all visible thumbnails are loaded. If the user scrolls down, further thumbnails are loaden on demand.


