Brennan’s Blog

There are some angry people out there who are upset about the decision by Yahoo to start restricting accounts on Flickr.com. Someone asked if there is a way to download their photos from Flickr. I happened to write a little software the other day to pull a Flickr feed and parse the output. This software just saves some of the photo information locally to display a gallery, but it could be modified to instead download and save the files. What I do not know how to get around is the limitation on the size of the feed. It seems it shows less than 20 photos at a time. If there is a way to get to all of the files for a given user id I would be able to find a way around this limitation.

Perhaps one way to help you make this work is to tag your photos with tags like set1, set2, set3 and so on and limit them to 15 per set. If you know a better way to do this, I would appreciate the tip.

What you need to do first is get your Flickr ID which you will use to identify your photos. A feed Url looks like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=123456@N00&format=rss2&tags=winter

The ID is the part in bold. Once you have the ID you can use the following function I created for C#. You will need to use the System.Net and System.Xml namespaces. If there is enough interest and I can find the time, I will complete this as a complete and free application to download Flickr photos. Please post a comment below if you are interested.

public static void ExportFlickrPhotos(string id, string tag)
{
	WebClient client = new WebClient();
	string feedUrlFormat = "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/" +
	   "photos_public.gne?id={0}&tags={1}&format={2}";
	string url = String.Format(feedUrlFormat, id, tag, "rss2");
	byte[] data = client.DownloadData(url);
	MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(data);

	StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
	XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();
	XmlNamespaceManager nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(document.NameTable);
	nsmgr.AddNamespace("media", "http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/");
	nsmgr.AddNamespace("dc", "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/");

	document.Load(stream);
	document.Normalize();

	XmlNode channelNode = document.SelectSingleNode("/rss/channel");
	if (channelNode != null)
	{
		XmlNodeList itemNodes = channelNode.SelectNodes("item");
		foreach (XmlNode itemNode in itemNodes)
		{
			XmlNode titleNode = itemNode.SelectSingleNode("title");
			XmlNode dateTakenNode = itemNode.SelectSingleNode("dc:date.Taken", nsmgr);
			XmlNode urlNode = itemNode.SelectSingleNode("media:content/@url", nsmgr);
			XmlNode heightNode = itemNode.SelectSingleNode("media:content/@height", nsmgr);
			XmlNode widthNode = itemNode.SelectSingleNode("media:content/@width", nsmgr);
			XmlNode tagsNode = itemNode.SelectSingleNode("media:category", nsmgr);

			string title = titleNode.FirstChild.Value;
			DateTime dateTaken;
			DateTime.TryParse(dateTakenNode.FirstChild.Value, out dateTaken);
			int width;
			int height;
			string photoUrl = urlNode.Value;
			string tags = tagsNode.FirstChild.Value;
			int.TryParse(widthNode.Value, out width);
			int.TryParse(heightNode.Value, out height);

			Console.WriteLine("title: " + title);
			Console.WriteLine("dateTaken: " + dateTaken);
			Console.WriteLine("photoUrl: " + photoUrl);
			Console.WriteLine("tags: " + tags);
			Console.WriteLine("width: " + width);
			Console.WriteLine("height: " + height);
			Console.WriteLine("title: " + title);

			//TODO use these values to download and save the file

		}
	}
}