My photo sharing site of choice is Smugmug. I can upload and view images at their original size, they offer effectively unlimited storage, support video streaming, protected sharing facilities and the website doesn’t suck. It comes with a price tag but I’m fine with that.

Over the last six months I’ve been playing with the Smugmug API. To date its been a somewhat painful experience. Roughly three months ago they introduced an additional security measure that meant most of the API calls required an additional parameter – which wasn’t documented on the API wiki (the _su cookie).

There are a number of helper wrappers already written for the API (though some are out of date) – but I figured it would be a good learning experience to put together something small for my own requirements. I decided on using the REST flavour of the API and initially implemented it with WebClient. However, after following up on a tip I got from attending the New York Windows Phone User Group I switched to RestSharp (using VS NuGet package installer) which made the code much more concise.

My most recent attempt was to add a feature to the application I’m writing that would allow me to view statistics for my Smugmug galleries. The website offers access to these statistics but in a pretty limited fashion. Having found an API (method.albums.getStats) I figured I could create a stats summary that was exactly was I was after. After several frustrating hours of tweaking the API call and getting nothing but zero hit counters back I resorted to Google. Sure enough – it seems that the API method doesn’t work, and in fact has been broken for months. Would be nice to have that kind of information on the API Wiki page, no?