Announcing flickrurlget Flickr photo downloader from command line in batch
This blog post is an announcement of flickrurlget, a command-line tool for Unix, written in Python 2.x that can be used to download photos from Flickr in batch. flickrurlget itself doesnt download photos, but it generates a list of raw photo URLs which can be downloaded with a download manager (even with `wget -i).
Download and install from source.
There are many photo download tools for Flickr (including command-line tools, GUI tools, Firefox extensions and Chrome extensions), none of which I tried having the feature set of flickrurlget:
- Can get highest-resolution (if possible, original) image URLs in:
- a Flickr photo
- a photostream of a Flickr user (i.e. all photos of the user)
- the favorite photos of a Flickr user
- an album (photoset) of a Flickr user
- a Flickr group
- a gallery of a Flickr user
- Batch operation: started from the command-line with a bunch of Flickr page URLs, and it discovers all the photos in there without any interaction.
- Can get anybodys photos (not only your own).
- Can get non-public and adult (non-safe) photos as well (after loggig in).
- Doesnt need a GUI or a web browser for most of the operations.
There is the command-line tool flickr_download (source code and PyPi projet page), which is also written in python. Here is how flickrurlget is better than flickr_download:
- Takes Flickr page URLs and figures out all parameters automatically.
- Can download groups and galleries (in addition to user photostreams and photosets) as well.
- Has user ID, group ID and photoset ID discovery: the user doesnt have to do manual ID lookups before running the tool.
- Uses only standard Python modules, no other dependencies.
- Better compatibility with old Python: works with 2.7, 2.6, 2.5 and 2.4; not only 2.7.
Flickr has a nice, full-featured REST API (works with both XML and JSON), its documentation is available here. flickrurlget uses this API. It can also optionally OAuth to log the user in.
