We have all our older pictures in three or four big iPhoto folders. Over the years, I picked a lot of “best-of” pictures of all our trips and uploaded them to Flickr. The *selection* itself is not something I stored offline, however. And when I added titles and descriptions, those didn’t end up in iPhoto, either.
Later, iPhoto got a “sync with Flickr” feature which I tried for a while but it was not easy to use and so I stopped.
As I’m moving more and more stuff back out of propietary Apple applications – on my laptop at work and at home I’m using Emacs and EMMS and `mpg123` and `mp3info` or `mpg321` to play MP3 files from folders. Bare bones, I know!
The galleries I’m hosting right now are created using fgallery. You provide a folder with images and titles and descriptions in text files, run `fgallery`, and it produces a new directory that you can simply upload to your server. I use `rsync` to do that.
All that remains is making a backup of my Flickr data and use `fgallery` on the albums I want to keep, in order to upload them to my own server. I’m currently trying Downloadair. I don’t like that it’s an Adobe AIR product because all those Flash exploits have given Adobe a bad name over the years, but hey, it looks good and there’s a big button to make an *account backup*. This looks very promising!
alex@Megabombus:~$ find /Users/alex/Desktop/Downloadair -type f | wc -l 4562
Off by one, but who cares. I guess it’s this OSX curse:
/Users/alex/Desktop/Downloadair/.DS_Store
#Pictures #Flickr
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Given that the title of the image is now part of the filename, here’s how to save it into a text file for `fgallery` to process:
alex@Megabombus:/Users/Shared/Flickr bis 2016/Alpenpassroute 20062008$ for f in *.jpg; do g=$(basename "$f" .jpg); n=${f/ [0-9]*.jpg/}; echo $n > "$g.txt"; done
alex@Megabombus:/Users/Shared/Flickr bis 2016/Alpenpassroute 20062008$ cd ..
alex@Megabombus:/Users/Shared/Flickr bis 2016$ perlbrew exec --with perl-5.22.0-thread-multi ~/src/fgallery/fgallery -c txt -f Alpenpassroute\ 20062008/ 2013-alpenpassroute/
...
I still wish that the *description* of these pictures would have downloaded, somehow. And now I wish that the EXIF data had been kept, too. As it turns out, fgallery now tries to sort by date taken as indicated by the EXIF data (which is missing) or filename (which is based upon the *title* of the image).
In short, important metadata is missing. 🙁
And I can’t find the original file, either, because the removal of the EXIF data changed the file.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-09-23 10:17 UTC