Flickr

You can fetch, store and display data about all your Photos and Photosets (Albums) for one or more Flickr Accounts. By default the included models and templates will link to the photo files on flickr.com, but you can also download the original files to store locally. These can then be used to generate images in all other sizes, to be served locally. See the Fetch Files management command below.

Set-up

In the Django admin, create a new Account in the Flickr app, and add your Flickr API key and secret from https://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/apply/ (you can ignore the User for the moment).

By default this will only allow the fetching of fully public photos. To fetch all photos your Flickr account can access, you’ll need to do this:

Enter your API key and secret in the indicated place in the file ditto/scripts/flickr_authorize.py. (If you’ve installed Ditto using pip, it might be easier to download the script from GitHub.)
Run the script on the command line (if you downloaded the file, change the path to wherever the script is):
$ python ditto/scripts/flickr_authorize.py
Follow the instructions. You should get a URL to paste into a web browser, in order to authorize your Flickr account. You’ll then get a code to paste into your Terminal.

Finally, back in the Django Admin note the ID of the Account you created. e.g. if the Django Admin’s URL is something like /admin/flickr/account/1/change/ then the ID is 1. Run the following management command to fetch information about the Account’s associated Flickr User (replacing 1 with your Account’s Django ID, if different):

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_account_user --id=1

Now you can download your photos’ data and, optionally, their original image/video files. See Management commands.

Models

The models available in ditto.flickr.models are:

Account: Representing a Flickr account that has API credentials and that we fetch Photos for. It has a one-to-one relationship with a User model.
TaggedPhoto: The through model relating Photos to tags.
Photo: A photo (or video) on Flickr. The media_type property of 'photo' or 'video' indicates which type this is.
Photoset: A photoset (album) containing Photos.
User: A single user on Flickr. There could be lots of Users but only one (or a few) will have associated Account objects – these are the Users we fetch Photos for.

Managers

Photos

There are several managers available for Photos. There are two main differentiators we want to restrict things by:

Public vs private: Whether a Photo is public or private (which includes those marked as for Friends and/or Family on Flickr.com).
Posted Photo vs Favorited Photo: In the future we may fetch Photos that have been favorited, rather than posted, by our Users that have Accounts. In this case we’d want to be able to differentiate between Photos that we posted, and Photos that we favorited.

On public-facing web pages you should only use the mangaers starting Photo.public_ as these will filter out all Photos that are not public.

Photo.objects.all(): The default manager fetches all Photos in the system. Public, private, posted by you or (in the future) only favorited by you.
Photo.public_objects.all(): Gets all public Photos in the system, no matter who posted them to Flickr.
Photo.photo_objects.all(): Gets all Photos, public or private, that were posted by one of the Users associated with an API-credentialled Account.
Photo.public_photo_objects.all(): Gets public Photos that were posted by one of the Users associated with an API-credentialled Account.

Of course, these can all be filtered as usual. So, if you wanted to get all the public Photos posted by a particular User:

from ditto.flickr.models import User, Photo

user = User.objects.get(nsid='35034346050@N01')
photos = Photo.public_photo_objects.filter(user=user)

NOTE: You can find a user’s NSID (the ID used by Flickr) at http://idgettr.com

Users

User.objects.all(): The default manager fetches all Users in the system.
User.objects_with_accounts.all(): This only gets Users that are associated with Accounts.

Template tags

There are three assigment template tags and one simple template tag available for displaying Photos, Photosets and information about a Photo.

Annual Photo Counts

Get the number of Photos taken or uploaded per year for all or one User-with-Account. This fetches totals for all Users, by time uploaded:

{% load ditto_flickr %}

{% annual_photo_counts as counts %}

{% for row in counts %}
    <p>
        {{ row.year }}: {{ row.count }}
    </p>
{% endfor %}

Both the year and count in each row are integers.

To count by time taken instead:

{% annual_photo_counts count_by='taken_time' as counts %}

The alternative count_by value is equivalent to the default behaviour:

{% annual_photo_counts count_by='post_time' as counts %}

To restrict totals to a single User-with-Account, include their nsid:

{% annual_photo_counts nsid='35034346050@N01' count_by='taken_time' as counts %}

Day Photos

Gets public Photos posted or taken on a particular day by any of the Users-with-Accounts. In this example, my_date is a datetime.datetime.date type:

{% load ditto_flickr %}

{% day_photos my_date as photos %}

By default this will return photos posted on the date. To specify whether it uses post_time or taken_time use the time parameter:

{% day_photos my_date time='post_time' as photos %}

{% day_photos my_date time='taken_time' as photos %}

Or we can restrict this to Photos posted by a single User-with-an-Account:

{% day_photos my_date time='post_time' nsid='35034346050@N01' as photos %}

Photosets

Gets Photosets. By default they are by any User and only 10 are returned.

{% load ditto_flickr %}

{% photosets as photoset_list %}

{% for photoset in photoset_list %}
    <p>
        {{ photoset.title }}<br>
        <img src="{{ photoset.primary_photo.large_square_url }}" width="{{ photoset.primary_photo.large_square_width }}" height="{{ photoset.primary_photo.large_square_height }}">
    </p>
{% endfor %}

You can restrict it to Photosets by a single User and/or change the number returned:

{% load ditto_flickr %}

{% photosets nsid='35034346050@N01' limit=300 as photoset_list %}

Photo license

When displaying information about a Photo you may want to display a user-friendly version of its license (indicating Creative Commons level, All rights reserved, etc). This tag makes that easy. Pass it the license property of a Photo object. Here, photo is a Photo object:

{% load ditto_flickr %}

{{ photo_license photo.license }}

This would create HTML something like this, depending on the license:

<a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/” title=”More about permissions”>Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License</a>

Recent Photos

To display the most recent public Photos posted by any of the Users associated with Accounts. By default the most recent 10 are fetched:

{% load ditto_flickr %}

{% recent_photos as photos %}

{% for photo in photos %}
    <p>
        {{ photo.title }}<br>
        <img src="{{ photo.small_url }}" width="{{ photo.small_width }}" height="{{ photo.small_height }}">
    </p>
{% endfor %}

The tag can also fetch a different number of Photos and/or only get Photos posted by a single User-with-an-Account. Here we only get the 5 most recent Photos posted by the User with an nsid of '35034346050@N01':

{% recent_photos nsid='35034346050@N01' limit=5 as photos %}

Management commands

Fetch Account User

This is only used when setting up a new Account object with API credentials. It fetches data about the Flickr User associated with this Account.

Once the Account has been created in the Django admin, and its API credentials entered, run this (using the Django ID for the object instead of 1):

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_account_user --id=1

Fetch Photos

Fetches data about Photos (including videos). The data fetched can be restricted by setting:

--days - fetch data from that many most recent days
--start - fetch from that date onward
--end - fetch from that date and earlier
--account - only fetch for a single Flickr account

The start and end arguments can be combined to fetch data from within a range of dates.

If no –account argument is supplied, data is fecthed for ALL Accounts.

So, this will fetch data for ALL Photos for ALL Accounts:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photos --days=all

NOTE 1: This took about 75 minutes to fetch data for 3,000 photos on my MacBook.

NOTE 2: Trying to run the same thing on a 512MB Digital Ocean machine resulted in the process being killed after fetching about 1,500 photos. See this bug.

This will only fetch Photos uploaded in the past 3 days:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photos --days=3

This will fetch Photos uploaded since midnight at the start of 31 December 2021:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photos --start=2021-12-31

This will fetch Photos uploaded before the end of the day (23:59:59) on 1 February 2022:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photos --end=2022-02-01

And this will fetch Photos uploaded from the start of 31 December 2021 and the end of 1 February 2022:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photos --start=2021-12-31 --end=2022-02-01

All time-related options can be restricted to only fetch for a single Account by adding the NSID of the Account’s User, eg:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photos --account=35034346050@N01 --days=3

Whenever a Photo is fetched, data about its User will also be fetched, if it hasn’t been fetched on this occasion.

Profile photos of Users are downloaded and stored in your project’s MEDIA_ROOT directory. You can optionally set the DITTO_FLICKR_DIR_BASE setting to change the location. The default is:

DITTO_FLICKR_DIR_BASE = 'flickr'

If your MEDIA_ROOT was set to /var/www/example.com/media/ then the above setting would save the profile image for the user with NSID 35034346050@N01 to something like this:

/var/www/example.com/media/flickr/46/05/35034346050N01/avatars/35034346050N01.jpg

Fetch originals

The fetch_flickr_photos management command only fetches data about the photos (title, locations, EXIF, tags, etc). To download the original photo and video files themselves, use the fetch_flickr_originals command, after fetching the photos’ data:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_originals

This took over 90 minutes for about 3,000 photos (and very few videos) for me.

By default this command will fetch all the original files that haven’t yet been downloaded (so the first time, it will fetch all of them). To force it to download all the files again (if you’ve deleted them locally, but they’re still on Flickr) then:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_originals --all

Both variants can be restricted to fetching files for a single account:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_originals --account=35034346050@N01

Files will be saved within your project’s MEDIA_ROOT directory, as defined in settings.py. There are two optional settings to customise the directories in which the files are saved. Their default values are as shown here:

DITTO_FLICKR_DIR_BASE = 'flickr'
DITTO_FLICKR_DIR_PHOTOS_FORMAT = '%Y/%m/%d'

These values are used if you don’t specify your own settings.

If your MEDIA_ROOT was set to /var/www/example.com/media/ then the above settings would save the Flickr photo 1234567_987654_o.jpg to something like this, depending on the Flickr user’s NSID and the date the photo was taken (not uploaded):

/var/www/example.com/media/flickr/35034346050N01/photos/2016/08/31/1234567_987654_o.jpg

Note that videos will have two “original” files downloaded: the video itself and a JPG image that Flickr created for it.

Once you’ve downloaded the original image files, you can use these to generate all the different sizes of image required for your site, instead of linking direct to the image files on flickr.com. To do this, ensure imagekit is in your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    'imagekit',
    # ...
)

And add this to your settings.py (its default value is False):

DITTO_FLICKR_USE_LOCAL_MEDIA = True

Any requests in your templates for the URLs of photo files of any size will now use resized versions of your downloaded original files, generated by Imagekit. The first time you load a page (especially if it lists many Flickr images) it will be slow, but the images are cached (in a CACHE directory in your media folder).

For example, before changing this setting, the URL of small image (Photo.small_url) would be something like this:

https://farm8.static.flickr.com/7442/27289611500_d0debff24e_m.jpg

After choosing to use local photos, it would be something like this:

/media/CACHE/images/flickr/35034346050N01/photos/2016/06/09/27289611500_d21f6f47a0_o/0ee894a3438233848e6e9d85e1985260.jpg

If you change your mind you can switch back to using the images hosted on flickr.com by removing the DITTO_FLICKR_USE_LOCAL_MEDIA setting or changing it to False.

Note that Ditto currently can’t do the same for videos, even if the original video file has been downloaded. No matter what the value of DITTO_FLICKR_USE_LOCAL_MEDIA the flickr.com URL for videos is always used.

Fetch Photosets

You can fetch data about your Photosets any time, but it doesn’t fetch detailed data about Photos within them.

So, for best results, only run this after getting running fetch_flickr_photos.

To fetch Photosets for all Accounts:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photosets

Or fetch for only one Account:

$ ./manage.py fetch_flickr_photosets --account=35034346050@N01