flickrbackup 0.4

Installation

1. Install Python 2.7 (http://python.org) if you don’t have it already:

2. Install pip:

   $ wget http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
   $ python2.7 distribute_setup.py
   $ easy_install pip

3. Install package from PyPI:

   $ pip install flickrbackup

Usage

Note: You must have a Flickr Pro account to use this tool, since Flickr only allows access to original-scale images for Pro members.

The first time you run flickrbackup, you should specify a start date, using the format YYYY-MM-DD:

$ flickrbackup -f 2012-02-28 -v photos

This will launch a web browser and ask you to authorize flickrbackup with your Flickr account, if you haven’t already. You may need to restart the script after this step.

Once authorised, flickrbackup will download all photos and videos for the authorised account that have been created or updated on or after the “from” date (February 28th, 2012 in this case) into the directory specified (“photos” in this case). Items are organised into subfolders by set and the year, month and day they were taken. If an item appears in multiple sets, it will be copied into both set directories. Metadata such as the title, description, tags and other information will be placed in a file with a “.txt” extension next to the image file. The image file name is based on the Flickr id of the image.

After the first successful run, a special file named “.stamp” will be placed in the download directory, containing the date of the last backup. This allows flickrbackup to be run again without the “-f” argument, for example in a scheduled nightly “cron” job, picking up from where it left off:

flickrbackup /path/to/photos

Here, we have also omitted the “-v” (verbose) flag, which means only errors and important messages are output to the console.

To see further help, run:

$ flickrbackup --help

Running on a server or NAS device

You may find it useful to run flickrbackup on a server or a device such as the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo as a nightly scheduled job (e.g. using cron), to back up new or changed photos regularly.

In this case, you may find it difficult to authorise the app with Flickr on its first run, as this requires a web browser. The solution is to run it once on your local machine, and then copy the authorisation token file that is stored in ~/.flickr to the server or NAS device:

$ scp -r ~/.flickr user@server:~/

Changelog