# FA API



## Wolf0 (May 8, 2015)

I know this has been discussed before, but I'd like to offer an idea I've not seen posted, from a developer. I've written a small app about a year ago that scrapes FA and downloads images, with the ability to login and search for artist content (filters available are the category: gallery, scraps, favs, rating, and type: image, text, so on...). It also worked on e621, which does have an API. Now, when scraping FA, I had to make lots of calls to read index pages - then I had to load the full page for each image to get the full URL. Once done, I could finally download the images the user was looking for. My app was never about mass downloading, in fact, it would refuse to DL queries with MASSIVELY open-ended parameters. It was about using powerful search features to get what you wanted.

I'm telling you this because I wonder if you'd have LESS bandwidth issues from bots if you had an API. Note that for every image, I had to download and parse a full page. This isn't much, maybe a few kb, but it adds up. If FA had an API, and made authors that wish to use it register for an API key, they could even ban abusive bots. In addition, they'd SAVE bandwidth from scrapers - a JSON response is one hell of a lot more compact than an HTML page with a search result or gallery, and further, the extraneous page load could be eliminated entirely.

There's tons of potential for external apps - and I think the idea that an API may solve the very problem FA is trying to avoid by not having one hasn't been put out there.


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