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Flickr

  • Easy Peasy: Using the Flickr API in Python

    Since I'm often required to hit the ground running at $MPOW on projects, I was a little concerned when I roped myself into assisting our photo archives with a Flickr project. The first goal was to get a subset of the photos uploaded, and quickly. Googling and poking around the Cheeseshop led me to Beej's FlickrAPI for Python. Little did I know that it would be dead simple to get this project going. To authenticate:

    def create_session(api_key, api_secret):
        """Creates as session using FlickrAPI."""
        session = flickrapi.FlickrAPI(api_key, api_secret)
        (token, frob) = session.get_token_part_one(perms='write')
        if not token:
            raw_input("Hit return after authorizing this program with Flickr")
        session.get_token_part_two((token, frob))
        return session
    

    That was less painful than the PPD test for tuberculosis. Oh, and uploading?

    flickr.upload(filename=fn, title=title, description=desc, tags=tags,
      callback=status)

    Using this little code plus a few other tidbits, I created an uploader that parses CSV files of image metadata exported from an Access database. And when done, the results look a little something like this.