“Origin null is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin” error for request made by application running from a file:// URL

For the record, as far as I can tell, you had two problems:

1. You weren't passing a "jsonp" type specifier to your $.get, so it was using an ordinary XMLHttpRequest. However, your browser supported CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) to allow cross-domain XMLHttpRequest if the server OKed it. That's where the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header came in.

2. I believe you mentioned you were running it from a file:// URL. There are two ways for CORS headers to signal that a cross-domain XHR is OK. One is to send Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * (which, if you were reaching Flickr via $.get, they must have been doing) while the other was to echo back the contents of the Origin header. However, file:// URLs produce a null Origin which can't be authorized via echo-back.

The first was solved in a roundabout way by Darin's suggestion to use $.getJSON. It does a little magic to change the request type from its default of "json" to "jsonp" if it sees the substring callback=? in the URL.

That solved the second by no longer trying to perform a CORS request from a file:// URL.

To clarify for other people, here are the simple troubleshooting instructions:

1. If you're trying to use JSONP, make sure one of the following is the case:
   • You're using $.get and set dataType to jsonp.
   • You're using $.getJSON and included callback=? in the URL.
2. If you're trying to do a cross-domain XMLHttpRequest via CORS...
   1. Make sure you're testing via http://. Scripts running via file:// have limited support for CORS.
   2. Make sure the browser actually supports CORS. (Opera and Internet Explorer are late to the party)

You need to maybe add a HEADER in your called script, here is what I had to do in PHP:

header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');

More details in Cross domain AJAX ou services WEB (in French).

For a simple HTML project:

cd project
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Then browse your file.

Works for me on Google Chrome v5.0.375.127 (I get the alert):

$.get('http://www.panoramio.com/wapi/data/get_photos?v=1&key=dummykey&tag=test&offset=0&length=20&callback=?&minx=-30&miny=0&maxx=0&maxy=150',
function(json) {
    alert(json.photos[1].photoUrl);
});

Also I would recommend you using the $.getJSON() method instead as the previous doesn't work on IE8 (at least on my machine):

$.getJSON('http://www.panoramio.com/wapi/data/get_photos?v=1&key=dummykey&tag=test&offset=0&length=20&callback=?&minx=-30&miny=0&maxx=0&maxy=150', 
function(json) {
    alert(json.photos[1].photoUrl);
});

You may try it online from here.

UPDATE:

Now that you have shown your code I can see the problem with it. You are having both an anonymous function and inline function but both will be called processImages. That's how jQuery's JSONP support works. Notice how I am defining the callback=? so that you can use an anonymous function. You may read more about it in the documentation.

Another remark is that you shouldn't call eval. The parameter passed to your anonymous function will already be parsed into JSON by jQuery.

As long as the requested server supports the JSON data format, use the JSONP (JSON Padding) interface. It allows you to make external domain requests without proxy servers or fancy header stuff.