NPR slideshows reach iPad browsing, API

We're making a major upgrade today to all of NPR's slideshows. Our slideshows are now iOS-friendly and available in our API.

Previously, NPR.org slideshows played in Flash, which iPhones and iPads couldn't display. The lack of API distribution also made these slideshows unavailable to our mobile apps and member station sites. In late fall, we began to change our production. We created a new slideshow experience in our NPR Music live event pages, which included a new player and distribution process.

In today's move, we expand the use of that technology to all of NPR.org. We are upgrading more than 2,000 slideshows: those from news stories, music stories and our Picture Show blog.

These slideshows include more than 30,000 images. If you browse NPR.org on your iPad, you can now view all of these images, swipe between images and tap for captions. We've improved the slideshows' buttons and behaviors for a better experience — wherever you seeing them. We plan to display slideshows across many more NPR platforms in the future.

If you use the NPR API, you can access many of these images.

More than 13,000 images, including more than 3,000 NPR images, are available to local station sites immediately. NPR's division, which works with local stations, already has NPR.org slideshows flowing into the Core Publisher platform and plans to optimize the experience further in the future.

For all API users, more than 8,000 images are now available.

To find details about using slideshows from the API, read the second half of this previous Inside NPR.org blog post, under "Collections." Every story that has a slideshow should have a collection marked as type "slideshow." An update to the earlier post is that the output is available in NPRML and now JSON.

Keep in mind NPR slideshows use images from a wide variety of sources, and we don't have rights to distribute all of our images. But we continue to work toward as much distribution as possible.

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