Flickr Savr
Save photos from Flickr to your disk with metadata embedded in the photos.
About
This is a digital preservation experiment. It crawls your Flickr Photos and saves them to disk with all the Flickr metadata stored in the EXIF. The idea here is, most preservation methods keep the photos and then keep a separate database (in whatever format) elsewhere. I thought I could have all the data stored in the photo so that it is not only coupled with the primary data but could be reconstructed from arbitrary collections of photos across people. It's just an experiment...it's not complete and I make no promises.
Version 2
Version 2 makes an explicit XMP namespace (with RDF XML) and stores all the metadata is neatly stored there. Version 1 just added well formatted strings to the ICTP keyword array. Not only was this messier and unorganized like that drawer in your kitchen, it had a consequence on general photo search tools. As a result, if you used Version 1 leave that old photos dir alone and make a new one for Version 2. They are incompatible.
Running this
You'll need to make your own Flickr API Key and Seceret. You'll also need to look up your NSID. You can find it by visiting a URL in the Flickr App Garden listed as Your user ID.
You can run the script as:
python flickr-savr.py -b PHOTODIR YOURAPIKEY YOURAPISECRET YOURNSID
Dependencies
- Python 3
- https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flickrapi Can be pip installed.
MacOS
I think you need all this stuff with homebrew:
brew install boost-python3 gexiv2 pygobject3
And if you are using a VENV and notice it cant find the gi package, you might need to point the PYTHONPATH:
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages
That's mine, yours might be different.
Limits
3600 queries per hour is all thats allowed. Thats 1 query per second. Each photo takes 3 queries to get its metadata...so that's a cap of 1200 photos per hour. It takes, by rough estimate, 3 seconds to query 3 times, download, and write to disk. So by most estimates you won't overrun the limit...that said, we'll sleep 200 ms between photos just to be nice