How to play

Generating a new puzzle

A PhotoSoup puzzle can be generated through either specifying a topic, or a Flickr username. All photos used in the Photosoup puzzle have a Creative Commons Attribution license.

A topic can be a single term ("Zoo" or "Olympics"), or a phrase, such as "la Sagrada Familia". Just like a tag is specified in Flickr.

Alternatively, a PhotoSoup puzzle can be generated using a Flickr user id. It is fun to try and solve a puzzle with the public photos and tags of one of your friends, or when using your own photos for that matter. To generate a puzzle, simply provide the username, for example: "Stewart".

When the "Play >>" button is pressed, a new puzzle will be generated. It can take a couple of second for the puzzle to be generated and loaded.

Playing a puzzle

The objective of the PhotoSoup puzzle is to find all tags hidden in the puzzle, before you run out of time.

Each puzzle consists of maximally 17 photos, and for each photo a tag is hidden in the PhotoSoup puzzle. Going with the mouse over one of the photos will enlarge that photo, such that you can take a closer look. Clicking on a photo will direct you to the Flickr page for that photo.

The game starts when all photos are loaded, and the timer starts counting down from 90 seconds. The tags in the puzzle are hidden horizontally from (left to right), vertically (top to bottom), or in diagonal direction (top-left to bottom-right). When you have found a tag, go to the first character with your mouse and with the button pressed, move the mouse to the last character of the tag. When doing this, you see the word being highlighted in red. When you release the mouse button, the highlighted area will become green, and the associated photo comes temporarily into focus. Also the remaining time you have for solving the puzzle is increased with 10 seconds every time a tag is found.

The game end whenever you run out of time, or when you have found all the tags in the puzzle. When the game has ended, to full solution will be presented. If you want to see the solution, before the game has ended, simple press the button "See solution" and your game will end.

Embed puzzle

Use this option to generate the code for the puzzle that you can use to put the puzzle on your homepage, blog, or on Facebook. Generate a puzzle by specifying either a topic or an username, and copy the code that is shown in the dashed area into you web-application.