Collections API overview · Street Art Cities developers notes that “The mobile app also keeps a special collection called Seen, with every artwork someone has marked as seen”, which confuses me even more. Does this mean that the API doesn’t actually provide access to Seen: that’s only tied to the mobile app?
Basically I’m struggling to work out whether the documentation is right, and I can actually get access to the list of artworks I’ve seen, and in which case how I do that, or whether the docs are misleading, and this is an app-only thing.
At some point in time, the mobile app would automatically add every item you marked as seen into a collection named ‘Seen’ automatically - I don’t think this is working anymore, or at least not fully.
So I think the Collections API is probably not the best place to find the user’s seen items.
I’ve quickly whipped up a new ‘Profiles API’ that allows you to get seens:
I’ve done very minimal testing, so let me know if something isn’t working as expected!
@thomas thanks for adding that so quickly! This seems to mostly work fine, but it looks like it doesn’t include artworks I hunted. It would be very useful to be able to get those too, though I’ve no strong preference for whether those are just automatically included by default, need a flag, or are even a separate API list.
Perhaps it would also be worth adding an updatedSince to parallel Search markers · Street Art Cities developers as well? Without that, my code needs to refresh the entire list and short-circuit once it sees an artwork already known to have been seen; in most cases that’ll still only be a single API call anyway, but that would be a bit cleaner and more lightweight with an updatedSince.
I’ve used that to throw together a quick demo of viewing only the unseen artworks in any city where you’ve been active: https://streetart.tonybowden.com/
That’s awesome! It would be cool to add this type of view to the website at some point too (probably by introducing the same filters we have in the mobile app, which already allow getting to a view similar to this)
Yes, the app version is very handy when I’m out and about, but having a web version is super helpful when I’m at home planning where to go next.
BTW: I’ve now extended this to also have a way of displaying artwork that isn’t on SAC yet - e.g. if I’ve seen something in a news story or instagram that I need to go hunt. Currently it just pulls in from a Google Spreadsheet, rather than having its own storage, but the location of that is configurable, so it’s possible for anyone to play with it if interested (the config is via the grid icon up in the top right):
