A couple of days ago I wanted to get some of my Flickr sets into iPhoto. I did not want any fancy two way sync but just read them in. I discovered that iPhoto can read RSS feeds in a format that Apple calls a Photocast. Unfortunately the RSS feeds from Flickr are limited to your public content and only return the last 20 or so results. Translating this information from the Flickr API into the RSS format should be a simple thing to do. I’ve used the Flickr API before so that was the first thing I went for. I briefly thought where I would want to deploy this – I am not a big fan of maintaining infrastructure for things like this. I remembered that Google AppEngine should be able to do this. Within a couple of hours I was able to whip up what I now call Photocastr in Python using Django. Overall the experience of creating something like this could hardly be better. Deployment is simple and the learning curve is steep. Know the limitations of the platform (granted, I already did before) and you have results very quickly.

So if you are interested in the result and have a Flickr account – give it a go. It’s free as long as it stays within the limits of the free quota provided by Google. Find it here: http://photocastr.appspot.com

Basically it makes use of the worst nightmares of using the so called “Cloud”. It makes your data destruct itself by distributing the key which is needed for decryption into a Distributed Hash Table. I will not go into more details about this, since there are way better papers about this on their homepage describing this in great detail.

If you wanna give it a try just go ahead and download the software on their homepage.