[steerpike]

Flickr's API is still the best.

Does everything you want it to.

Has a few fun surprises that you didn't expect that make it even more fun to make things with.

Simple to use.

Well documented.

Test playground at your fingertips to experiment with any call you like.

One of the first APIs ever released and you can still count the number of other available APIs that positively compare on one hand.

[connordoner]

Can you give examples of those fun surprises? I'm curious. Thanks!

[steerpike]

One of the fun things you can do is using the set of places API methods.

flickr.places.findByLatLon returns a placesId based on a supplied lat/long of somewhere you might be interested in.

You can then use that placeId to get photos around that location with a call to flickr.places.getChildrenWithPhotosPublic

Even more amusing is that you can get the actual shape co-ordinates for that place (for example the shape values or the polyline values of your local suburb or city).

I can tell you that I didn't expect to be able to access the shapefiles, bounding boxes and polylines for essentially every suburb I needed for a location based app I was building 10 years ago from a photo app API.