Entries tagged 'flickr'

I decided to stop renewing my subscription with Flickr recently to create some incentive for me to self-host my photos and integrate them more closely here. Before my subscription lapsed, I requested an archive of all of my Flickr data, and now I am finally getting around to working with the data.

When you download your Flickr data it includes JSON files named like photo_50626142.json and JPEG files named like young-mimes_50626142_o.jpg and the name of the JPEG is not in the JSON data.

You can generate it, probably, using the name and ID but I’m not sure what the rules are for turning the name field into the snake-case form.

Except that images without a name have JPEG files named like 17483805680_f57f81feb5_o.jpg. The id is at the beginning, the other bit is just random or something. (Looks like this is the same filename used for the original URL in the JSON.)

The way to go seems to be just matching on the ID embedded in the filename. (That’s what the one other tool I’ve seen that uses the export data does.)

And when working through all of this, I found that I must have not downloaded one of the archive files from Flickr, because I was missing 83 JPEG files. I was able to use the JSON files to rescue them.

Now that I know that I actually have all of the data and all of the images are in a Backblaze B2 bucket fronted by Gumlet, the next step will be loading all of the relevant metadata into a database table and then wiring up some ways to browse the images here.

one of the things i’m really behind on doing is setting up a good way of backing up all of the photos i’ve taken (and will take in the future). one thing i’ve considered is using amazon’s simple storage system (s3). i have about 25GB of pictures, so unless my math is faulty, it would cost about $5/month to store and $6 (once) to upload them all.

but hey, i’m already paying $25/year for a flickr pro account, and that includes unlimited storage and bandwidth. so now it is just a matter of figuring out how to get all of my pictures over there — easy to do, unless i want to do it right.

doing it right would include synchronizing the photo titles, description, and keywords (tags) between flickr and iphoto, and dealing intelligently with the photos that i have already uploaded to flickr. there’s also the issue of photos that are edited in iphoto, where it would be nice to also have the original (unmodified) photo backed up.

maybe picturesync is much of what i want.

i still want to play with amazon s3, but i have another idea for that: email archiving.

here’s a little more fun with my new zoom lens, tripod, and the nearly-full moon.

the image processing of the human eye and brain is pretty impressive when you compare it to how much fiddling you have to do just to get a simple static picture like this from a sophistimicated digital camera.

but i can’t upload what my eyes and brain see to flickr.

sam ruby pulled a good quote on building in support for internationalization in web applications, which i agree is really important.

it is very annoying that i can’t use my flickr recent comments feed because the atom feed is broken due to bad utf-8 handling.

i’m thinking of doing another talk at the mysql conference next year about handling this sort of thing. there’s really no excuse for it. which makes it a little hard to do a 45-minute talk on — it’s so easy to get right!

because i know you’ve been itching to buy prints of my photos, i’ve gone ahead and enabled the print-ordering feature for everyone. (you have to sign up as a flickr user first, i believe.)