Batch Download of Photos From Flickr Based on Their Tag at strange symphonies

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Batch Download of Photos From Flickr Based on Their Tag

November 20th, 2008 by aizatto

For the FOSS.my event, I wanted everyone to tag their photos with foss.my or foss.my 2008. Because this makes it easier to easily see FOSS.my buzz as it happens on Flickr!

A Tale of Sucky Wordpress Plugins

I was looking for a plugin to grab Flickr photos by a specified tag, so that we can use it in the foss.my gallery. Though there are many Flickr plugins for Wordpress, there was none catered to my requirements. Unable to find a solution, I thought it was quicker to hack one myself.

So this script just expanded from there, and I quickly had a Flickr batch downloader.

Note: There are several requirements:

Download phpFlickr, and unzip it to the same directory as the script.
You need to obtain a Flickr API key.

Use the source

<?
/*
 * phpFlickr 
 *   http://phpflickr.com/
 *
 * Flickr API 
 *   http://www.flickr.com/services/api/
 *
 * Flickr API call flickr.photos.search
 *   http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.search.html
 * 
 * Photos are available via the following format:
 * 	 http://farm{farm-id}.static.flickr.com/{server-id}/{id}_{secret}_[mstb].jpg
 *
 * For more information visit http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html
 *
 * Applying for a Flickr API Key
 *   http://www.flickr.com/services/api/keys/apply/
 */

require_once("phpFlickr.php");

define('VERBOSE', array_search('-v', $argv));

// Download a batch of photos from the given page
function download($photos) {
	$download = 0;
	foreach ($photos['photo'] as $photo) {
		$filename = sprintf("pics/%s-%s.jpg", $photo['owner'], $photo['id']);
		$url      = sprintf("http://farm%d.static.flickr.com/%s/%s_%s_o.jpg", $photo['farm'], $photo['server'], $photo['id'], $photo['secret']);
		if (file_exists($filename)) {
			if (VERBOSE)
				print sprintf("33[33m %-10s %s33[0m \n", "Skip", $url);
			else
				print sprintf("33[33m.33[0m");
			continue;
		}
		if (VERBOSE)
			print sprintf("33[32;1m %-10s %s33[0m \n", "Download", $url);
		else
			print sprintf("33[32m.33[0m");
			
		file_put_contents($filename, file_get_contents($url));
		$download += 1;
	}
	return $download;
}

$flickr  = new phpFlickr("YOUR_API_KEY");
$options = array('tags' => 'fossmy, "fossmy 2008", foss.my, "foss.my 2008"');

$photos = $flickr->photos_search($options);
print sprintf("Available 33[32;1m %d 33[0m \n", $photos['total']);

// Download the first batch of photos
$downloaded = download($photos);

$page  = $photos['page'];
$pages = $photos['pages'];
// Download the following batch of photos
for ($i = 2; $i < $pages; $i++) {
	$options['page'] = $i;
	$photos = $flickr->photos_search($options);
	$downloaded += download($photos);
}
if (! VERBOSE)
	echo "\n";
print sprintf("Downloaded 33[32;1m %d 33[0m/ %d \n", $downloaded, $photos['total']);

Running it

It’s just as a simple as:

php download.php

Sample Results:

Available  492
..................[trim]............
Downloaded  0 / 492

It even comes with a -v flag, so you can view what files are being downloaded.

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