Picasa Python API: Get recently uploaded photos from all contacts

Question

I'm using the Python Picasa API to get the 20 most recent photos from all my contacts (so only 20 photos, the most recent). I coded this in Python, but it is very - very slow. It's not really optimized too, because I'm fetching like 20 photos per contact (and I only want 20 pictures in total).

def getRecentPhotos(self, user='default', limit='20'):
    users = self.getContactIDs(user)
    photos_tmp = []
    photos = []
    for user in users:
        photos_tmp = self.getRecentPhotosByUser(user)
        for photo in photos_tmp.entry:
            photos.append(photo)
    photos_sorted = sorted(photos, key=lambda photo: photo.timestamp.text, reverse=True)
    return photos_sorted[:20]

This request takes 8 seconds on average (on a local webserver). How could I optimize this? The longest call is the part where the two for loops are nested..

Answer 1

You could get 20 photos from the first user, then for each user after that, start by getting just the one most recent photo. If that's recent enough to be in the most recent 20, get some more (until they're no longer new enough). If not, move on to the next contact straight away.

If you're not too concerned about always having exactly the most recent 20 each time, you could also cache the results, and sporadically check each contact to see if they've added new photos.