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Photobucket, an online photo and media sharing site, has launched a new application programming interface (API) that allows developers and programming hobbyists to interact with the site and create mashups, web apps and widgets using Photobucket data.
Given that many of Photobucket's members are coming from MySpace and other social network sites, which are themselves rolling out APIs, this should be good news for users since it provides the tools necessary to do more with your Photobucket images.
Photobucket competitor Flickr is way ahead in the API game, but the new Photobucket API goes a considerable way toward closing that gap.
The new API exposes just about everything in Photobucket's services including the ability to create, edit and access albums, upload new content, search through public images and grab metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, EXIF, etc.)
Photobucket also gets points for leveraging OAuth, a standardized authentication method that Flickr still doesn't support. One other very nice API method that Flickr doesn't offer is a resize image option which allows you to pass in a variety of preset image dimensions and resize your photos.
The only real drawback to the API seems to be that a handful of features are only available to “premium members” (I believe the premium members bit refers to Photobucket pro accounts, which are $4/month, with slightly cheaper options if you pay in advance).
More details about the new API can be found at the new developer section of Photobucket.
As part of the release, Photobucket has put up a new application gallery where you can check out all the various tools developers have created. For the launch there are some featured apps from the likes of Adobe, Blogger, FotoFlexer and many more.
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