I am reading the Google Photos API documentation. I can't find out what mediaItemId is, see for example here:
https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/access-media-items#get-media-item
There are some other questions that might be related, but they have no answers:
How to get mediaItemId of a Google photo using its shared URL?
I've not used the API but I'm familiar with other Google services and am a Photos user.
If you consider you're experience with photos.google.com, you browse a somewhat unstructured list of all your photos. The Photos (phone|browser) apps do categorize photos by date but you have to search to filter by other metadata to find the specific photo(s) that you're seeking. Or you happy-scroll through years of photos of your cat.
This contrasts with another common metaphor for arranging files in which a hierarchy of folders is used to categorize the content e.g. /photos/cats/2022 but this mechanism is limited because you can only really navigate through one dimension (the folders).
Considerable metadata (type, width|height, creation date etc.) is associated with each photo and it is customary in schemas like this to construct a unique ID for each object. The unique ID is sometimes exposed to the end-user but not necessarily. Identifiers are generally for the system's own purposes.
With Photos, there are public, unique identifiers in the form of URLs for each photos but evidently the id and the URL although probably related (perhaps via a hash) aren't obviously related.
So, since it's not always possible to specific a photo uniquely by e.g. "The one of my dog where he's wearing sunglasses because of the eclipse" and the absence of folders, a really powerful alternative (which you'll need to employ) is to search for some subset of the photos and then iterate over the results.
It appears that the Photos service has such a search to which you provide Filters and each of the items in the results will be a MediaItem (uniquely identified by id).
Unlike the file system example above, because Photos does not use a fixed hierarchy, we can view our Photos by filtering them using an extensive set of metadata: photos of cats, taken in 2022, using my phone.
What are the queries we can use with media/popular. Can we localize it according to country or geolocation?
Also is there a way to get the discovery feature's results with the api?
This API is no longer supported.
Ref : https://www.instagram.com/developer/endpoints/media/
I was recently struggling with same problem and came to conclusion there is no other way except the hard one.
If you want location based popular images you must go with location endpoint.
https://api.instagram.com/v1/locations/214413140/media/recent
This link brings up recent media from custom location, key being the location-id. Your job is now to follow simple pagination api and merge responded arrays into one big bunch of JSON. $response['pagination']['next_max_id'] parameter is responsible for pagination, so you simply send every next request with max_id of previous request.
https://api.instagram.com/v1/locations/214413140/media/recent?max_id=1093665959941411696
End result will depend on the amount of information you gathered. In the end you will just gonna need to sort the array with like count and you're up to go whatever you were going to do.
Of course important part is to save images locally rather than generating every time user opens the webpage. Reason being not only generation time but limited amount of requests per hour.
Hope someone will come up better solution or Instagram API will finally support media/popular by location.
Title says almost everything.
I found that the music "Boom - 2006 Remastered Version" has two different IDs that can be found in the App:
3EKjTDAEIdyQqsA9qtb5P2
0zlAqnRv07p9ezzFf3k2ky
But when using the API to get information about each one, it returns the same ID:
3EKjTDAEIdyQqsA9qtb5P2
Is this a bug?
It is unfortunately not a bug, but it is indeed very annoying, and your code needs to be able to handle it.
"Give me info for track A! Ok, here is info for track B, just like you asked".
It is a legacy thing still left in the Spotify metadata model called track redirects (the some concept exist on albums and artist too, but are less of a problem there). It was made so that we could quickly merge duplicate albums. It means that once upon time, there were two "different" tracks on different albums that were identical. We had lots of them on artists pages for popular artists. Labels would very often upload one album for one country and another identical one for another country instead of just saying that one album was available in two countries. Sometimes by mistake, most often because of cross licensing issues between labels and countries.
Track redirects are quite rare though if you look at the entire catalog. Most of these redirect tracks are only surfaced in old playlists and are for instance never returned in search results or artist pages. These days we never merge duplicates like this, but instead make sure only one is shown on artist pages, etc. and link to the other in case one is unavailable in your country. That is the concept called Track relinking in the docs. https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/track-relinking-guide/
I work at Spotify and bump into this problem every now and then. I want to change this so the tracks and album become just regular duplicates, because it is much easier to reason about, but it will take a while to fix. I guess I can update my answer here in a few years when it is done.
Using the Instagram API, I subscribed to a tag with the Real time feature. I sync media that match my project's criteria, then save those to DB. When users visit my website, I display these images from my DB (and not from instagram API).
From time to time, I see broken links showing up in the images. I identified that the source of the problem is that those images have now been deleted.
What's a good way to handle this?
Probably not attempting to duplicate the Instagram DB (or part thereof) would be the best option. Depending on the usage of your project and what sort of tags you're subscribing to, that could get pretty large pretty quickly.
Short of that, doing a quick HTTPRequest to the image URL (and checking the response code) before deciding whether to display it would do the job.
#Steve Crawford is on the right track.
The problem with your solution is that you are duplicating volatile data that you:
a) can't control
b) don't receive notifications on.
I would think the better method would be track the meta data of the images you are interested (like the author, url,date,etc) and then display them if they are still available.
If you are going to cache data you also need to a way to invalidate your cache. So another option would be to duplicate the data as you already are, but also have a background job to ensure that the data is still valid and remove the ones that aren't.
The original plan was to write this as a blog post, entitled "Inefficiencies in the Spotify Metadata API : Or, How the Jackson 5 killed my Browser", but changed my mind at the last minute as I have a habit of missing the obvious in documentation,perhaps an undocumented feature might exist which I have missed, or someone else has solved the issue - so hence this question has a certain blog-post tone about it!
I am developing a small web-app, mostly for a small group of people, which will allow anyone to update a Spotify playlist. As not everyone has Spotify (though I don't know why!), the page will update a database with songs, as App running in Spotify on my laptop polls the database for updates, then using the Spotify Apps API, the playlist is updated, and anyone subscribing to the playlist gets the update. This is ok, though I would like to use push rather than poll, but that's a topic for another day.
I searched around for a Javascript library to use with the Spotify Metadata API, and found one (https://github.com/palmerj3/SpotifyJS) though it was basically a wrapper and still required you to parse the JSON yourself. Thinking I could go one better and put some basic parsing in for the most common fields (title, artist, album, Spotify URI) I started working on my own library/JQuery plugin.
Search by track is not a problem, it's a single call to the spotify metadata API, the results are easily parsed, matching the returned artist with the requested artist (if present) makes for an easy search by title/artist.
Search by Artist (obtain a list of all songs by a particular artist) though, appears to be a pain-in-the-**! As best as I can tell from the docs, this is the process.
Search for the artist: this will return a list of artists which match the query
For each artist, lookup their albums: this will return a list albums
Lookup each album and retrieve a track list
Compare the artist for each track with the search artist, if it matches output
The first step will return a small list of artist matches, Foo Fighters has 2, Silverchair 1, and The Jackson 5 has 4. This small list turns into a larger number of album matches - from memory Foo Fighters returned 112, which then turns into even larger number of track lists. From a Javascript/JQuery perspective, this leads to daisy-chained AJAX request, for each step, and at each step massive numbers of, nearly concurrent GET requests against the Spotify servers.
The initial version I wrote cheated and used synchronous AJAX, and worked ok, as each request must complete before the next would start, though, this would lock the browser up for some time, and removed the possibility of using feedback to the user that the system was running. I then switched to asynchronous requests and all hell broke loose! You immediately hit issues with rate limiting on the Spotify end, which returns resoponses with 502 bad gateway (not listed in the spotify docs as a status by the way), or 503 - both of which JQuery interpreted as status code 0 - which was interesting, requiring debugging in Firebug. I throttled the requests down on the client side, I found that 1 every second was about right, to avoid rate limiting and ensure I got a response containing data each time, however, this then causes massive lock ups in the browser as it had upwards of 30 or 40 GET requests in parallel, all returning pretty much at the same time (though some requests responded after 15+ seconds!) and then parsing all the JSON responses.
I looked into alleviating the load by using a server-side approach, though this has downsides as well:
1. you don't avoid the basic issue in that the API can not handle the task in an efficient manner
2. for a busy site, the bandwidth usage will be against the server, which will also present a single IP, for multiple users you will soon hit the rate limit due to parallel users
The server side does offer caching though which could be beneficial, to this end I found a PHP Library - metatune (https://github.com/mikaelbr/metatune) advertised as the "The ultimate PHP Wrapper for the Spotify Metadata API", but unfortunately only offers the same basic lookup/search as the Spotify Metadata API - i.e.: no listing of all songs by an artist.
Thus, I have now disabled searching by artist, until I find a suitable solution.
Assuming I have not missed anything, it seems, to me at least, to not be an efficient API design, as it encourages you to make large numbers of requests to the Spotify servers, which is not good for me as a client, and not good for Spotify as a server. I can't help but think that if there was a request such as:
ws.spotify.com/search/1/artist.json?q=foo+fighters&extras=tracks
then the issues discussed here would be alleviated, a single request would cover what requires 3 sets of multiple requests currently; rate limiting wouldn't be as big an issue; the overheads to process the data on the client are greatly reduced; the overheads for Spotify to handle would be reduced and the entire service would be more efficient. The fact that the request would return a very large data set is not an issue, as the API already splits data into "pages".
So, my questions to the crowd:
1. Have I missed something obvious in the documentation, or is there a secret request?
2. In the absence of an API request, does anyone have a suggestion on how to make my system more efficient?
3. Has anyone solved this issue before?
Thanks for reading! Took a long time to get to the questions, but I felt it necessary to provide as much reasoning to find the best solution, and also, it illustrates the deficiency in the API, which I hope someone from Spotify will notice!
Finally as an aside, projects like this make me feel like we've swapped Flash for Javascript but the performance is still as bad! Anyone else feel the same?
Cheers!
sockThief
Unless I'm missing something, does this do what you want?
http://ws.spotify.com/search/1/track.json?q=artist:foo+fighters
The artist: prefix tells the search service to only match on artist. You can read more about the advanced search syntax (which also works in the client) here.