Caching of Flickr API calls¶
There are situations where you call the same Flickr API methods over and over again. An example is a web page that shows your latest ten sets. In those cases caching can significantly improve performance.
The FlickrAPI module comes with its own in-memory caching framework.
By default it caches at most 200 entries, which time out after 5
minutes. These defaults are probably fine for average use. To use the
cache, just pass cache=True
to the constructor:
flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key, cache=True)
To tweak the cache, instantiate your own instance and pass it some constructor arguments:
flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key, cache=True)
flickr.cache = flickrapi.SimpleCache(timeout=300, max_entries=200)
timeout
is in seconds, max_entries
in number of cached
entries.
Using the Django caching framework¶
The caching framework was designed to have the same interface as the Django low-level cache API - thanks to those guys for designing a simple and effective cache. The result is that you can simply plug the Django caching framework into FlickrAPI, like this:
from django.core.cache import cache
flickr = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key, cache=True)
flickr.cache = cache
That’s all you need to enable a wealth of caching options, from database-backed cache to multi-node in-memory cache farms.