FAQ
photos.search won't return more than 4k or 5k results?
I am executing a search several times sequentially in search of
images. The first few times I run the search, it works great. As soon
as I get to around the 4000th image, however, the search starts
failing. It tells me there are 0 pages of results for my search.
images. The first few times I run the search, it works great. As soon
as I get to around the 4000th image, however, the search starts
failing. It tells me there are 0 pages of results for my search.
Stewart Butterfield, Rep. from flickr, responded on this:
We've gone back and forth on this for a while, but the I think the 4k limit has now officially evolved from bug to fact-of-life. With time-sorted results, you can add time ranges to the queries and then get all photos. We'll likely alter the UI on time-sorted searches to make this easier on the site.
On the other hand, for relevance-sorted or interesting-sorted results, the expense of sorting beyond 4k is just too high. And, in any case, the 4,001st "most relevant" or "most interesting" result for a given query is probably not all that interesting or relevant. So, there's not a lot of return on changing the way the search systems work to accomodate that.
- Stewart
Link to the original discussion
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We've gone back and forth on this for a while, but the I think the 4k limit has now officially evolved from bug to fact-of-life. With time-sorted results, you can add time ranges to the queries and then get all photos. We'll likely alter the UI on time-sorted searches to make this easier on the site.
On the other hand, for relevance-sorted or interesting-sorted results, the expense of sorting beyond 4k is just too high. And, in any case, the 4,001st "most relevant" or "most interesting" result for a given query is probably not all that interesting or relevant. So, there's not a lot of return on changing the way the search systems work to accomodate that.
- Stewart
Link to the original discussion