All your Flickr photos in Dropbox, with style | Hacker News Reader

All your Flickr photos in Dropbox, with style

blog.theopenphotoproject.org

18 pointsjmathai14 comments

It seems like a precarious position to be in, supporting a service that helps users walk away from a competitor. Not to say that you shouldn't – I just wouldn't expect flickr to stand idle while it's done.

This is particularly true if it's being done via the flickr api – beyond the API being explicitly for non-commercial development (without other arrangements), the number 1 item on the "you shall not" list is: Use Flickr APIs for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of Flickr.com. (source: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/tos/ )

Just say'n...

Valid points.

To apply for a commercial license one of the criteria is that you have to represent a major brand. Not sure why but if you don't say yes to that, you end up with a non-commercial license.

Using the Flickr API to "recreate" the experience is a bit vague. Probably intentionally. But it's unclear if it means to build a Flickr-like interface on top of their API or exporting your photos and then re-uploading them somewhere else.

Additionally, we're helping users move their photos into their own storage accounts. Which is a bit different than moving them onto ours. We do offer a layer of functionality on top of their storage account so I can see how there might be some concern.

Nonetheless, we're respecting their rate limits and even have libraries on Github[1] if you wanted to do it yourself.

[1] https://github.com/openphoto/export-flickr

I think you're misreading the TOS. That part of the TOS prohibits creating a photo sharing site that uses Flickr as its backend. The OpenPhoto site doesn't give much detail, but this tool is (apparently) just downloading the photos to DropBox and importing them into OpenPhoto. Since the actual OpenPhoto code doesn't have anything to do with Flickr, it's not violating the TOS.

There are similar "import from Flickr" tools for almost every photo sharing service there is, and I've never heard of any of them getting their Flickr API key revoked.

Unless they go over the rate limits :)

Ha! I was planning on writing a Flickr photo "liberator" this weekend after I recently learned there is no way to download all my original photos in bulk, even as a Pro user.

Signed up for a beta invite, hopefully now I don't have to.

If you're a PRO user you get access to the originals, but not in bulk. You can sign up for a 3 month pro subscription for about $4. Just make sure you have enough space in your Dropbox (if that's what you choose to use).

Check your email :).

Thanks!

I was also planning on exporting photos to S3. It's like you read my mind...

There's a bug in Chrome for the AWS linkage. Working on a fix now but if you get it, try Firefox and it'll work.

Hmm, I skipped linking my account to S3 or Dropbox during setup assuming I would have an option to later store my pictures there. Am I out of luck?

No reply link to your last question so doing it here.

The ability to change storage providers is probably 2 months out. If you wanted to do it now, I could just reset and delete your account and you could start over and link it from the start. Let me know.

FWIW, a cheap/fast one off way to bulk download all your photos would be to sign up for a free trial SmugMug account, use their Flickr import tool and then do a bulk download from SmugMug.

Using SmugMug's Flickr importer Firefox plugin (no, I don't know why they chose to make it a Firefox plugin), it took less than 2 hours to import ~8100 photos (44 GB) from Flickr to SmugMug and it preserved the metadata I had for the photos.

Definitely not the most elegant way to do it, but if you needed to do it in a pinch it would work.

Going directly (and staying inside) your preferred storage service is much more elegant, no? That's basically what we've built.

Oh yeah, I agree 100%.

That was just a "if you're really desperate and can't wait for the invite, here's a way to do it" idea.

You may use SocialFolders (http://socialfolders.me) to get a local copy of your Flickr photos (disclosure: I'm a co-founder of SocialFolders, and we plan to support OpenPhoto later this year).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com