Downloading Flickr photos

Flickr Leech is a cool web app. It displays all Flickr photos, including those already rendered invisible because of the 200-photo limit in free accounts. But I need more: I want to download these photos for backup.

After looking around, I found several tools that does the job. They didn't quite work for me, so I decided to hack my own.

Using the Flickr API and a Python wrapper, I came up with the following:

1. Get flickr.py and manually add it to the host Python library.


2. Get an API key from Flickr.


3. Write the script:
   

   
   #!/usr/bin/python
   
   import flickr
   import urllib
   
   flickr.API_KEY = 'API key goes here'
   user = flickr.people_findByUsername(u'username')
   photos = flickr.people_getPublicPhotos(user.id, 500)
   total = 0
   for photo in photos:
      photoURL = "http://static.flickr.com/%s/%s_%s_o.jpg" % (photo.server, photo.id, photo.secret)
      photoFile = "%s_%s.jpg" % (photo.title, photo.id)
      data = urllib.urlretrieve(photoURL, photoFile)
      total = total + 1
      print "Downloading %s" % photoFile
   print "Done with %s photos." % total



4. Make the script executable, create a directory where to download files, and execute the script from there.


5. Rinse, dry, press.

I know, the script is very rudimentary. It's my first Python script, and it needs a lot of work: there's no exception-handling for one. But it worked perfectly for me.