Backing up my flickr photos and metadata

March 14, 2010

I’ve been trying to backup my flickr account for long time and haven’t (until now) found a good solution. I want to backup not only the original photos but the titles, descriptions, comments, geotags, etc. There are several programs that will run MacOSX / Linux for backing up just the photo files, but most (or all) of these don’t backup metadata or else they are really difficult to get running under OSX.

Today I found Offlickr.py, a python script that uses the python flickrapi module and libxml2 to do exactly what I want. Getting all this to work on Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) took some searching and compiling so I wanted to record what I did here.

Steps:

Download Offlickr.py and libxml2 source, put them in directory [DIR] (I downloaded ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.7.6.tar.gz
Compile libxml2: untar the libxml archive and enter it’s directory:
tar xvzf libxml2-2.7.6.tar.gz; cd libxml2-2.7.6
and compile:

./configure; make; sudo make install
Before you run Offlickr.py you’ll have to make sure Python knows where to find the libxml2 module. Mine got installed in /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages so I put this directory in my python path:
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages
Go back to [DIR]: cd ..
Before running Offlickr.py you may need to make a modification. I had to do this to avoid getting the error:
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'isPrivateFailure' referenced before assignment
What I did (following this Google code issue) is modify line 390, by inserting the line:
```
    isPrivateFailure = False
```
make sure the line is properly indented so that Python doesn’t complain.
Now we’re ready to rock and roll. Find your flickr ID (e.g. mine is 97495157@N00) and run:
```
mkdir BACKUP
./Offlickr.py -i 97495157@N00 -d BACKUP -p
```
See the Offlickr.py page above for more commandline options.