Tag Archives: known

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The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a distributed, peer to peer, file system. It’s pretty cool. So, here’s an experimental plugin that adds backend file system support for this protocol for Known. 

Currently this functions as a drop in replacement for the Known file storage system, along the same lines as the S3 plugin. It’ll store photos, profile pictures, and any other stored data to IPFS instead of on the local file system, or in Mongo (if you’re using Mongo).

Usage 

You’ll need an IPFS server to talk to. For development I installed go-ipfs, so you can use that, or one of the public ones.

Next, copy the IPFS directory to your IdnoPlugins directory, and activate it.

By default, the plugin is set up to talk to localhost but you probably don’t want to do that forever, so update your config.ini as follows:

[IPFS]
host = 'servername'
port = 1234
apiport = 5678

Replace the values accordingly, but make sure you keep the [IPFS] section header.

Still to do

At the moment, this is a drop in functional replacement for file storage, and doesn’t go into some of the cooler things you can do with Content-Addressable storage.

As pointed out in this ticket, an obvious improvement would be to cache stuff from the image proxy to IPFS (which already takes place), but to directly reference them via their content hash (which doesn’t currently take place), as this should be more efficient.

Anyway, that’s future development and would require some core hooks. I’ll get to that next, I’m sure.

Anyway, kick the tires and let me know your thoughts. Pull requests more than welcome!

» Visit the project on Github...

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Well, it has been a long time coming, but I’m delighted to report that you can now help out the Known project, in a big way, by joining our OpenCollective!

By joining us at OpenCollective, you can help fund the project. Help us keep the lights on, and help us spend more time building the software that you love.

So, if you find Known useful, I strongly encourage you to sign up and contribute!

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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...