There have been a lot of changes recently with Flickr, and from February, free users with over 1000 photos are going to start seeing their old photos being deleted. Premium membership has also seen a sharp increase in price.

So, this seems like an opportune moment to move my photos off the platform – I’ve got something going on to 3K photos on there, and while I still have the originals, I’ve nicely sorted them into albums, so it would be a shame to lose that.

Previous attempts at writing an import tool connected over the API, but this broke some time ago when Flickr changed their authentication mechanism, and honestly I’ve not had the time to fix it.

Thankfully, Flickr now offers a full data export via your accounts page. This export contains a bunch of zip files that contain all your media, as well as handy .json dumps of all the image meta data. Using this seemed like a much better way than fighting with Flickr’s API again.

Usage

The new tool is a Known console plugin, so unlike the previous tool, you’ll need to install this to your ConsolePlugins directory.

Next, you need to request and download all your data from Flickr. Do this via your accounts page.

Once you have your .zip files, place them in a directory somewhere, where you can access them from your Known install.

Next, execute your import by running the import code from the console:

./known import-flickr username-to-import-to /path/to/flickr/export

Where username-to-import-to is the user who’s stream these photos and videos will appear under, and /path/to/flickr/export is the directory you’ve stuffed your .zip files. 

There is no need to unzip these files ahead of time, the import tool will do that for you.

After you’ve run the import, assuming that there have been no errors, you should see all your photos and videos appearing on your stream!

» Visit the project on Github...