Hugo’s blog

I have published a new version of Offlickr. It now enables to back photosets up, which is particularly useful as there is quite a bit of information in them.

There is now an Offlickr class also, which can be reused in other programs, in case somebody would like to reuse the code in another UI.

I started uploading my pictures to Flickr, and spending time writing descriptions, titles, adding tags. Other people have also contributed by adding notes, etc. So I really want to be able to get this data back, as I don’t want to solely rely on Flickr to keep my data.

I also wanted to play with the Flickr API. I looked into toolkits provided, and they are all built on the REST API. I ended up choosing Beej’s Python Flickr API. However, it uses an HTTP POST for all its calls. It’s especially weird for Offlickr which is a series of information retrieval (the permission requested is read-only). As there is some authentication information in the parameters sent, maybe it makes sense. It might have been better to use another authentication technique (digest auth?).

Anyway, I ended up with a small Python script which does the trick for now: Offlickr. I probably will improve it, but I now feel confident that I can get my data back from Flickr.

I called it Offlickr as once you have the metadata in XML form and the pictures, it should be fairly easy with some simple XSLT to have an offline copy of your Flickr space.