flickrbackup 0.8.1

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, as well as a log of the ids of the photos that have been processed (mostly as a progress indicator).

It may be useful to log important messages to a file. In this case, use the --log-file (-l) option (with or without the -v flag to control the amount of information output):

flickrbackup -l /var/log/flickrbackup.log /path/to/photos

The log file will contain the type of message (e.g. INFO for informational messages or WARN for warnings) and the date and time of the message as well.

What if there are errors, e.g. due to a temporary conneciton problem? flickrbackup will attempt to download them again (you can control how many times or turn this off using the --retry option; the default is to retry once), but if there are still errors they will be printed to the console/log file.

We can store a list of the ids of the photos and videos that were not correctly processed by using the --error-file (-e) flag:

flickrbackup -e /path/to/photos/errors.txt /path/to/photos

Later, we can attempt to manually re-process just these photos using the --download (-d) option:

$ flickrbackup --download /path/to/photos/errors.txt /path/to/photos

If this succeeds, you should delete errors.txt, since the -e option will always append to, not replace, this file.

To see further help, run:

$ flickrbackup --help

Known limitations

• Movie files will always get the extension .mov, even if originally uploaded as e.g. .avi or .mpg, because Flickr doesn’t provide a means of discovering the original file extension.

• Photos that are deleted or moved between sets after being backed up will remain in the backup.

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