Grabbing Images

  1.  
    1. Hey,

      Simple and possibly stupid question...  just wondering about grabbing images from entries in Freebase. I couldn't find any examples in the API documentation, but most articles now tend to have either a user-uploaded thumbnail, or a scrape of the equivalent Wikipedia article's image.

      So does anyone have experience pulling images into your own apps and/or have an example of how to do so?

      (Sorry if this has been answered before but I couldn't find anything...)

      1. Check out the Metaweb Application Reference Guide and follow the link to §4.8, “Fetching Content with trans” in the Metaweb Read Services chapter.
      2. I recently did this, and also, just fixed a bug in my program this morning.  The bug  happened because the code I copied from did not gracefully handle cases of multiple images.  (Alas, I'm really just gluing together things without a lot of "understanding" and so these kinds of problems are happening to me a lot!)

        Maybe this will help:

        var query = { // This is our MQL query
           type: "/music/artist",   // Find a band
           name: bandName,  // With the specified name
           id: null, // Fetch the ID of the band to link to their Freebase page
           album: [{  // We want to know about albums
              "/common/topic/image" : [{ // the images list on the album
                "id" : null,  // each image has an ID
                "optional" : true // don't require an image to return a result
           }]
        };

        Once your query comes back, you should have a list of 0 or more images in the "/common/topic/image" field.  Each image will have an ID.  You can then pass that ID to Freebase's thumbnail API to generate a version of that image at any size you like:

        http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000006cf560a

        I'm not quite sure 

      3. At first glance, that query looks correct.  You can test it out by throwing it into the queryeditor and testing it out.
      4. Ooops, the "I'm not quite sure" was an accident, must have been scrolled off the bottom.  I'm sure that's the query.  :)

        What I wasn't exactly sure about was how to get the dimensions of the original image, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere!!

      5. /api/trans/image_thumb can return you the image in a specified height/width, but won't tell you anything about the original size.  In your query, you can ask for the /common/image/size, which is a CVT that has the x/y sizes.


    Discussion is posted in:

    Think this discussion also relates to something else? Cross-post it by adding a new discussion area:

Search Discussions

Related Discussions