“photosearcher” package in R: An accessible and reproducible method for harvesting large datasets from Flickr

Abstract

The social media website Flickr contains a wealth of spatial and temporal metadata, which can play an important role in environmental research including cultural ecosystem service and ecological assessments. However, the uptake of Flickr is potentially limited by issues with accessibility to the Flickr Application Planning Interface (API), which limits results and restricts searches. Here, we introduce photosearcher, an R package aimed at overcoming these challenges. We provide examples of how photosearcher can be used as an accessible and reproducible method of accessing large spatio-temporal datasets from the Flickr API.

Keywords

• Biological datasets
• Cultural ecosystem services
• Flickr
• R package
• Social datasets
• Social media