1. S-Abf
   Member
   Posted 7 months ago #

   I know, that it's possible to access the feed from http://www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages to show Bing daily images as background image. But I like the post cards pile/polaroids pile most and this combination is silly. Since there recur some images very often, the pile makes no sense (same picture multiple times, gnah...)

   (I already wrote this to John via submission form on the website because I overlooked, that feature requests should be placed in forum.)

   I found a way to retrieve all images ever published by any of the eight Bing sites (US, AU, NZ, CA, GB, DE, CN, JP):

   The <ahref="www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages">Bing Image Archive accesses the images via AJAX based on the script getimage.php. There is one parameter you have to give this script to tell, that you want to have information about the image from what date and what Bing "version".

   The schema for the parameter value is YYYYMMDD-TLD.

   So, if you want the picture published by Bing New Zealand on Oct. 29, 2009, you have to access the URL .../bingimages. The result you get is a text file containing a JavaScript compatible serialized associative array. In there are several information. The most important are the value of the imageurl property as well as of the copyright property, whereas the latter consists of several information itself: The image title, the photographer and or the copyright owner, the publishing Bing -- these information are separated by delimiters (but these are not always the same). In a few cases the one or the other information is missing, only the publishing Bing String is always in the same format available. The imageurl value only stores the filename of the picture that can be found in the web directory http://www.bing.com/fd/hpk2/ and alternatively via http://www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages/cache/ (but that's no good idea, because (I guess) if the archive couldn't download the original image, then it's black there!).

   P.S.: I wrote really much text. Meanwhile I got another (way easier?) idea. JBS could store the RSS feed on the hard disk every time it is accessed. So JBS could generate a pile from both the stored and the remote information and after some days there are no more doubles.

2. John Conners
   Administrator
   Posted 6 months ago #

   This sounds like the sort of thing you might be able to get Yahoo! Pipes to do for you and then subscribe to the feed. Worth a look!

   JBS caches feeds so that it doesn't have to hit them every time (which would cause unnecessary bandwidth) so I'm not sure about constantly looking for changes to the feeds and storing them - but I'll certainly have a think about what it could do to help. Although duplicates from the feed may look the same to you but are identified differently so JBS can't necessarily tell which ones are duplicates.

3. S-Abf
   Member
   Posted 6 months ago #

   This sounds like the sort of thing you might be able to get Yahoo! Pipes to do for you and then subscribe to the feed. Worth a look!

   Okay, I'll give it a try.

   Although duplicates from the feed may look the same to you but are identified differently so JBS can't necessarily tell which ones are duplicates.

   I found out that they have the same MD5 hash. Besides this the file names have a certain pattern and the "file title" part is also the same.

   JBS caches feeds so that it doesn't have to hit them every time (which would cause unnecessary bandwidth) so I'm not sure about constantly looking for changes to the feeds and storing them.

   The bandwidth point is a good one. But the caching of feeds is a behavior I could not experience yet. Maybe we mean different things.

   It's nice to hear ... um read :) ... that you still want to help. I also work on a solution that will work for me (and possibly for other people, too) -- an own customizable feed. But because I'm kinda slow, this might take some time. In the meantime I use a feed reader application to store all images on hard drive and I let JBS generate a pile consisting of only two or three images (looks nicer because I see more of each image).

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