THE SITUATION
I've been tooling around in the Etsy sandbox API trying to figure out a solution for a client who wants to show the default image and title to all their Etsy listings. Upon clicking, they want it to direct them off the website and onto that Esty listing's page.
Now, figuring out how to get the name and url of all their listings was easy and can be done in one public API call:
http://openapi.etsy.com/v2/shops/:shop_id/listings/active?method=GET&api_key=:api_key
This call will not only return the name of the listing and the url of listing, but also a multitude of other information on that particular item. I suppose I should limit my call to just getting the fields I need, but for sake of example, I digress...
What surprises me most is that what is not included in that gigantic array of information is something I'd expect to find in there: the images associated with the listing or at least the main image. There is however a separate API call I can make to get the images for a single listing, but that would require getting the listing_id and making a separate API call for each item. This now turns what I would expect to be one (or hell, even two) calls to the Etsy API, into 1 plus however many items you return. Granted if you have 100 items you're selling in a shop, that's 101 API calls in just a few seconds! Call me crazy, but I feel there's got to be a better way to do this than what I've found.
THE QUESTION
What is the easiest way to make an Etsy API call to return all the images (or even the main image) for all the listings in a shop?