With Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr they are now closing down Yahoo Photos so this would be an excellent opportunity to not only move the albums but also organise all the photos locally and maybe even back them up. After reading John Goerzen‘s review of Flickr I decided that Flickr was the way to go. I started with looking at some photo management software. Reading reviews gave me the feeling that what I wanted wasn’t so much a flashy GUI tool for playing around with our photos; what I wanted was a tool that would organise them for me into a hierarchy of folders. F-spot can do that but it kept on crashing on me. Luckily I came across photoname, it’s a simple command line tool that does exactly what I want–copy photos into a folder hierarchy based on the EXIF data. Due to our terrible organisation we had several copies of the same photo in different places so it required a lot of manual labour to get all photos in order.

Once that was done I started looking into how to upload everything to Flickr. I had already seen flickrfs but I had never tried. Irritatingly it adds the tag flickrfs to all pictures one uploads, thank goodness it’s FOSS; I made a patch. I decided to tag all photos with year, month and date for now. Due to the hierarchy created by photoname I ended up running the following little shell/python snippet in each “year folder”:

for d in *; do
    cp --verbose ${d}/* ~/tmp/flickrfs/stream:$(python -c \
    "print ':'.join(map(''.join, zip(['Y', 'M', 'D'], '${d}'.split('-'))))")/
done

After quite a long wait I now have almost all the pictures uploaded to Flickr.

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