Getting your pictures from Flickr into iPhoto
Thursday, 27 September 2007
Last month I posted about backing up metadata for your Flickr photos using a simple little Python script. That script gives you an XML file for each photo with all that photo's metadata stored inside it for ready access. If you're a recent switcher to OSX, you might want to take advantage of that data to get your photos from Flickr into iPhoto.
Once you have iPhoto and Flick in sync, you can import new photos from your camera into iPhoto and then export to iPhoto using FlickrExport and they will stay in sync. Of course you may have no interest in getting your photos from Flickr to iPhoto, in which case feel free to stop reading. In my case, while I had the photos around, they were in multiple folders on my hard drive and didn't have any tags associated with them. On Flickr I had them tagged, dates corrected, and so on. Rather than recreate that process I decided it would be easiest to take what I'd done in Flickr and push it to iPhoto.
The linked AppleScripts below were mostly what I used to accomplish this process, again in conjunction with the XML files from the script mentioned in Backing up your Flickr photo info. Now some caveats: I had never used AppleScript before when I wrote these, and my copy of AppleScript: The Definitive Guide was still in the mail. If you know AppleScript you will be aware of how quite unlike most other scripting languages it is. The scripts below are undoubtedly not in best AppleScript style, and I didn't spend any time modularizing them, so you'll see common functions in each for XML parsing and so forth.
So with that said, take them for what they are and do with them what you please. Hopefully between them they'll give you enough to make a start on whatever iPhoto library-munging project you've decided to take on.
Once you have iPhoto and Flick in sync, you can import new photos from your camera into iPhoto and then export to iPhoto using FlickrExport and they will stay in sync. Of course you may have no interest in getting your photos from Flickr to iPhoto, in which case feel free to stop reading. In my case, while I had the photos around, they were in multiple folders on my hard drive and didn't have any tags associated with them. On Flickr I had them tagged, dates corrected, and so on. Rather than recreate that process I decided it would be easiest to take what I'd done in Flickr and push it to iPhoto.
The linked AppleScripts below were mostly what I used to accomplish this process, again in conjunction with the XML files from the script mentioned in Backing up your Flickr photo info. Now some caveats: I had never used AppleScript before when I wrote these, and my copy of AppleScript: The Definitive Guide was still in the mail. If you know AppleScript you will be aware of how quite unlike most other scripting languages it is. The scripts below are undoubtedly not in best AppleScript style, and I didn't spend any time modularizing them, so you'll see common functions in each for XML parsing and so forth.
So with that said, take them for what they are and do with them what you please. Hopefully between them they'll give you enough to make a start on whatever iPhoto library-munging project you've decided to take on.
Correct dates on Flickr photos
Friday, 17 August 2007
When I drank the Flickr cool-aid, I had to move all of my pictures from my home-grown Perl/CGI webserver setup. They uploaded to Flickr just fine, but quite a few of them had incorrect dates due to incorrect or missing EXIF information. Fortunately I had all of the image files named in the
Starting from the python script I had previously written to archive my photo tagging information (see this post), I just had to add a function that used a regular expression to parse the date information out of the photos' filenames and call
YYMMDD_n.JPG format, so I knew there had to be a way to fix their dates programmatically.Starting from the python script I had previously written to archive my photo tagging information (see this post), I just had to add a function that used a regular expression to parse the date information out of the photos' filenames and call
photos.set_Data in the Flickr API. The function is up on TextMate's pastie site for those interested.Backing up your Flickr photo info
Sunday, 12 August 2007
I gave up on my Perl/CGI scripted website for my kids' photos a couple of years back and moved them lock, stock and barrel to Flickr. It's a great service and I'm very happy with it. My initial upload was more than a thousand pictures, but I wanted to start out the right way so I tagged them all with people's names and so on. As you can imagine, this was pretty tedious, so I decided I would try and make sure I would never have to do that again. I did some digging around and came across the Flickr API. The authentication mechanism is a trifle cumbersome but some kind soul had already gone through the pain and posted a CC-licensed Python script that did most of the work. I messed around for a little bit and ended up with a little Python script that downloads an XML file for each photo in my photostream. The XML file contains all the metadata for the photo, including its title, description, tags, dates taken and posted. I run this script every week or so and it grabs the data for the pictures I've posted since the last time I ran it. This way I have all my photos' metadata in a parse-able form, so if Flickr should ever go away I can write something to parse the files and import them to whomever at that time.
I posted the script via TextMate's excellent Pastie service, in case anyone is interested. I had to strip out my Flickr API key and its shared secret (which you need in order to access the Flickr API) for obvious reasons, but it's simple enough to get your own from Flickr.
UPDATE April 3rd, 2008:
I had to update the script to pass the authorization token when looking up your username as it started returning "failed to find user". The updated script is linked above.
I posted the script via TextMate's excellent Pastie service, in case anyone is interested. I had to strip out my Flickr API key and its shared secret (which you need in order to access the Flickr API) for obvious reasons, but it's simple enough to get your own from Flickr.
UPDATE April 3rd, 2008:
I had to update the script to pass the authorization token when looking up your username as it started returning "failed to find user". The updated script is linked above.