temporal-collisions

See photos from identical instants in time.

Overview

This is a service which finds recent Flickr photos which were taken at the exact same second. It was created in 2009.

It's implemented in TypeScript, and is exposed through a simple API service deployed to a Cloudflare Worker. The service was ported from its original PHP implementation (saved in /archive) in March 2022.

An interactive version is available on frontiernerds.com, along with a blog post.

Usage

Requests can take an indefinite amount of time given the breadth of the search involved, so the request operates on a best-effort basis according to the maxSearchTimeSeconds parameter that's passed. The API clamps maxSearchTimeSeconds to 60 seconds.

Via web API

Request

curl -s "https://frontiernerds.com/api/temporal-collisions?maxDistanceSeconds=0&maxSearchTimeSeconds=10&minImageWidth=834&minImageHeight=834" | jq

Response:

{
  "status": "success",
  "results": {
    "timeRequested": "2024-09-08T15:43:23.000Z",
    "timeMin": "2024-09-03T15:43:23.000Z",
    "timeMax": "2024-09-08T15:43:23.000Z",
    "imagesChecked": 295,
    "collisions": [
      {
        "time": "2024-09-08T22:20:00.000Z",
        "photos": [
          {
            "id": "53980112124",
            "title": "N-2024-09-08-2220_f",
            "imgUrl": "https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53980112124_ccffafdb49_o.jpg",
            "pageUrl": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/149567335@N07/53980112124"
          },
          {
            "id": "53980112424",
            "title": "N-2024-09-08-2220_f",
            "imgUrl": "https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53980112424_b711becde9_o.jpg",
            "pageUrl": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/97102756@N07/53980112424"
          },
          {
            "id": "53980228840",
            "title": "N-2024-09-08-2220_f",
            "imgUrl": "https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53980228840_e58586ffbe_o.jpg",
            "pageUrl": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/185288333@N07/53980228840"
          },
          {
            "id": "53981233084",
            "title": "20240908_2220_0657",
            "imgUrl": "https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53981233084_cf1fa7f8ae_o.jpg",
            "pageUrl": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/201213898@N02/53981233084"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

As a module

This package is not published to NPM, so module resolution is up to the user.

import { inspect } from 'node:util'
import { getTemporalCollisions } from 'temporal-collisions'

const collisions = await getTemporalCollisions({ minImageWidth: 278, minImageHeight: 278 })

console.log(inspect(collisions, true, 10, true))

License

CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 © Eric Mika