Flickr AutoDownloadr 2.0.7

http://flickrslideshow.fateback.com/

Batch downloader for Flickr photos.

License

This program is provided free of charge for anyone who wants to use it. I'm not interested in making money out of it. If you really want to, I will accept PayPal donations to the email address above. Or you could buy me a year�s Flickr Pro account - that'd be really good. Or you could buy me something from my Amazon wishlist, if you were feeling particularly generous.

Most of all, I would like to know if people find this useful. Please send me an email if you use it - even if it's just to say "nice program". Any suggestions, comments and bug reports are very welcome indeed. The latest version should reside at the above web address.

The program was written in AutoIt, and I will happily send you the source code if you want to see it.

Documentation

On running Flickr AutoDownloadr with no command-line options, you will be presented by a dialog box. Choose which Flickr photos you would like to download using the options in the Flickr tab.

Everyone on Flickr: you can view either the most recent or the most interesting photos from the entire Flickr community. In the Get dropdown box below, select Newest (date posted) to get the most recently-posted photos, or Most interesting to get today�s �Interesting� photos. Or select a different date in the date boxes underneath to get the �Interesting� photos from that date.

Photos from one user: show all of one user's photos. You can add a new user by selecting the 'choose another' option in the dropdown box or clicking the find button. Type the user's name, Flickr ID or the web address of their Flickr photo page. The program will query Flickr and find the information for this person. If you have too many users on the list, delete one by pressing the delete button. Hold down SHIFT and click the button to delete them all from the list.

You can narrow down the number of photos for either of these two options by choosing tags to find. Type tags in the appropriate box, separated by spaces - e.g. party newyear. You have three options:

� photos with ANY of the tags; e.g. sunrise sunset.

� photos with ALL of the tags; e.g. skyscraper London.

� photos with text in the tags, title or description.

The Related? button queries the Flickr site for related tags. So a search for related tags to london might return england, thames, bigben, uk. Tick all the tags you want in the window that appears.

The Get ... first dropdown box determines the sort order in which the photos are downloaded.

You can also narrow down your choices using a date range - select either a 'to' or 'from' date, or both, and tick the boxes next to each date to make your selection. You can specify whether this means posted on this date, or taken on this date.

On Flickr, you can mark any photo as a 'favourite'. Select One user's favourites to see which photos a particular user has chosen. Select a user with the dropdown box on the left first.

Set: some users organise their photos into 'sets', like albums. Select a user first, then click 'Refresh' to find their sets.

Photos from this group: show photos from a group's photo pool. You can automatically add all the groups a user belongs to, or search for groups with specific words in the titles. Again, you can delete groups if you have too many by clicking the delete button - hold down SHIFT and click it to delete them all.

Options

In the Options tab, you can tell the program what to do with the images it finds. Set the downloaded photo resolution on the Photo size dropdown box. Not all photos are available at �original� resolution, and the program will revert to the next lowest if one resolution is not available. Clearly higher resolution images will look better but take longer to download.

Photos will be filed into relevant folders underneath the folder you specify. You can specify a template for the folder names and image filenames.

The Folder format box specifies the names of the subfolders that pictures will be stored in. There are only two tags here:

� %i: ID of the user, set or group

� %n: Name of the user, set or group

By default, the program stores images in subfolders according to names. If you specify a blank template, it will not use subfolders. This is the 'flat structure' option from previous versions.

The 'File name format' box specifies the image names. By default, the program uses a combination of the index number and the Flickr photo title for the name. Valid tags are:

� %i: photo ID

� %t: title

� %d: taken date, in the form yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss

� %p: posted date, in the same form

� %q: quality, i.e. resolution (4 = medium, 5 = high, 6 = original; set using the dropdown box in this options tab)

� %n: sequence number of the photo in the slideshow (padded with zeroes, i.e. 001..999)

� %o: user name of the owner

If you're short of space on your local hard drive, specify a maximum size for the cache. If the downloaded photos exceed this size, the first ones downloaded will be deleted. A maximum cache size of zero means photos will not be deleted.

If the cache folder is over its maximum size before the slideshow starts, the program will ask you if you want to clear it. By default the folder is sent to the Recycle Bin when this happens. However, if you are really short of space, and deleting the folder from the Recycle Bin each time is too annoying, you can get the program to permanently delete the folder. Open the file Flickr AutoDownloadr.ini from the program's folder (usually C:\Program Files\Flickr AutoDownloadr) in a text editor (like Notepad). Add a line in the [Main] section that says ProperDelete=1. When clearing the folder, the program will now PERMANENTLY delete all files in it. Please EXERCISE CAUTION with this option - I accept no responsibility if you accidentally delete all your important documents. It is for this reason that you are recommended to give this program its own folder to save a cache in (e.g. C:\Documents\Flickr Photos) - then there's no way it can delete important stuff.

If you check the cache metadata option, Flickr metadata - titles, descriptions, tags, comments etc. - will be stored in the JPEG comment field of each downloaded photo.

Synchronise: this keeps the photos on your computer up to date with those on Flickr (e.g. in a set or a group, though it will work with any type of photos). Any that were downloaded previously but are no longer on Flickr will be deleted from your computer. This could be useful (for instance) if you were running a digital picture frame unattended, and you wanted to keep the photos on it up to date simply by maintaining a photoset on Flickr.

Click the Login button to authenticate yourself as a Flickr user. When logged in, you may be able to access (for instance) photos from your contacts marked as �private�.

Click Go to start downloading. An extra tab will appear showing you the progress of the download. Please note: due to licensing issues, not every photo can be downloaded. Flickr gives users the option to license their photos �all rights reserved�. When a photo has this license, the program is obliged to check whether it has permission to download the photo or not � permission can be granted to friends and family, for instance. If we are not permitted to download a photo, it will show up as Denied in the right-hand column of the photo list. I suggest you contact the user in question and ask them to change the license to allow you to download. (This feature has been imposed by the Flickr devs in response to complaints from the community.)

Running From The Command Line

As above, you can run the program from the command line, specifying a particular Flickr URL, prefaced by flickrss. For example, to run a slideshow of my pictures from the command line, I would type: (all on one line)

"C:\Program Files\Flickr AutoDownloadr\Flickr AutoDownloadr.exe" flickrss:http://www.flickr.com/photos/benshepherd/

Again, this should work using any Flickr URL, so pointing it at a set, group or tag search page should have the desired effect.

You can also run the program with the commmand line switch /run - this will just run a download, rather than asking you what to fetch. The program will use the settings from last time. (So you obviously have to run the program at least once, so it knows what to do.)

In command-line mode, the program will use options that you set in interactive mode. You can override these by appending one or more switches to the end of the command line. Some of these are:

/res=n (n=4..6) set the resolution, 1-6 where 6 is best

Future Additions

Please let me know what you think of these - is there a demand? Can you think of anything better?

� multi-language support (please let me know if you could translate the program into another language)

� unattended/digital picture frame mode:

o checks for new pics every so often; scans local folder for pics too (i.e. memory card inserted)

� download pics from other photo hosting websites (photobucket; Facebook - any others?)

o (I suppose this would necessitate a change of name; can anyone suggest one?)

� a screensaver version

� a desktop wallpaper changer version

� geographical search

� sort by relevance (only relevant to full text search?)

� group tree browse

� slideshow preview

� group/set descriptions and user location as tips on mouse-over dropdown boxes

� add contacts shows a listview box

� confirm on loading lots of thumbnail images (or do it in the background...)

Version History

2.0.8 (8 Feb 2010)

� fixed array range error

2.0.7 (28 Jan 2010)

� downloads several pictures at once

� various bug fixes � rewrote everything to use callbacks

2.0.6 (9 Jan 2010)

� shows downloading progress in a table in an extra tab

2.0.5 (5 Jan 2010)

� fixed gathering of (id, server, secret) data - was failing to get originals - should work now!

2.0.4 (3 Jan 2010)

� fixed sets not correctly displaying when user deleted

� fixed crash on set dropdown change, or refresh button click

2.0.3 (2 Jan 2010)

� fixed group thumbnails - they are 48x48

� fixed upload date range bug

� fixed group select bug

� show titles in progress window

� fixed problem with files renamed with no extension - ASCII zero characters removed from titles

� fixed searching for user by URL - only looks for flickr.com in the username

2.0.2 (26 June 2009)

� fixed date range

� fixed downloading info/EXIF/comments in background

2.0.1 (24 June 2009)

� fixed display of photo number in progress window

2.0beta (23 June 2009)

� removed slideshow functionality - now just 'download only'

� merged frontend and backend back into one program

� fixed problems with Unicode characters in user names

1.14

� bugfix: fetches contacts correctly now (though it does take a while...)

� bugfix: downloads next available size if original not available

1.13 (12 October 2007)

� now downloads original size pictures correctly (API update)

� update: search for a specific group using the URL (inc. private groups)

1.12.3 (5 December 2006)

� bugfix: command line mode works

1.12.2 (30 November 2006)

� bugfix: slideshow works. dammit! :)

1.12.1 (26 October 2006)

� bugfix: program actually runs :)

1.12 (25 October 2006)

� updated XML parsing for sets (modification of Flickr's API)

1.11 (25 June 2006)

� synchronise mode: delete local images that no longer appear on Flickr

� query cache should be kept within a sensible limit (default is 10Mb)

� fixed: proxy setting wasn't being used

� saves images to a temporary file before moving them to save folder

1.10 (6 June 2006)

� added GUI option to set the proxy

� put additional options in second tab

� downloads comments via the API now - might be a tad quicker...

� can specify a template for folder names (user/set/group id or name)

� template for file names (id/title/sequence number/owner/quality/date)

� saves queries and results in a cache - synchronise feature coming soon...

1.9.4 (23 May 2006)

� fixed: dates; interesting photos on date range

� maximum number to download at one go is 100,000 (but it will eat a lot of memory - you have been warned!)

� tag walk seems to work okay now

1.9.3 (23 May 2006)

� fixed: multiple tags merging into one (oops)

� fixed: slideshow not displaying at all

� changed backend code fetching photo lists - this may break some things, especially tag walk mode

1.9.2 (21 May 2006)

� fixed: taken date range

1.9.1

� fixed: downloading private sets

1.9

� added: -run option to just run the slideshow

� cache should be cleared in a more sensible way

1.8

� added: view photos from contacts

1.7.2

� fixed: allows >1000 photos per set

� temporary text files will really be removed, I promise

1.7.1

� fixed: 'open file' error when downloading >64 photos

� added: flat structure option

� now checks login and/or pings server at startup

� attempts to simultaneously download info - should speed up downloading

� temporary metadata text files will be removed (oops)

1.7

� split the code into two parts, one to download and one to view

� this should improve the responsiveness of the slideshow

� now caches metadata from Flickr in the JPEG comment field

� downloads comments and shows in top right (press I to toggle)

� P toggles mouse pointer in slideshow

� now uses API to get Interesting photos from all users

� fixed problem reading tags with punctuation inside

� progress bar is a proper window

1.6.1 (31/1/6)

� temporary-ish bugfix when downloading lots of pictures (700+) - test it out and let me know!

1.6 (14/1/6)

� fixed non-fullscreen operation (press F7), and documented it properly

� added the option to search text in titles/desc