a rookie mistake, a programming challenge and a fresh start

It's gone. 4 years and 30GB of photos gone because of a stupid lapse in concentration. All my originals are just nowhere - rsync --delete really fucked me this time!

Never the one to look on the dull side of things, this presented an interesting challenge. Seeing as I don't know exactly when it happened, the chance of an undelete was pretty slim. So I turned to Google to see what was available to me in the way of backing up my flickr photos. It's not quite 30GB of originals, but 1145ish decentish resolution exports is much better than nothing.

There are a couple of things available, but the only notable one is Java, slow, crap and doesn't download some photos with no explanation, so that's that. Seeing as I basically only wanted a straight backup of everything of mine on flickr, I figured that there had to be a way that I could just get a list of all my photos so that I could archive them and be done with it. This wasn't really the case, so I opted for using flickr's API calls for everything in sets and everything not in sets. Because, if I ever decide to put it out in public, I wouldn't want it getting abused; I've decided to use flickr's authorisation API to confirm the user as well. It works really well, and is downloading my originals as we speak.

The only potential issue is, because it puts your set photos in their own directory, there will probably be some duplicates, but I'd rather have 2 of one than none. If you want a copy of the script, you'll need OSX/Linux with PHP 4 at least. Leave a comment and I'll email it over.

And, now it's time to start a new era of photos.