Flickr Download Tools

As soon as i released my FlickrCrawler project on CodePlex, I searched for it and found at least 3 other similar backup utilities. I think the only differentiating feature of FlickrCrawler right now is that you can schedule a task and have it run unattended overnight so that all of your pics are archived on a nightly basis.

The other tools appear to require you to actively download photos and sets. FlickrCrawler will archive all of your photosets with the click of a button, and as I said, it can be scheduled to run so it's always up to date - just set it and forget it. For those of you looking for a good .NET Flickr backup / archival utility, check out the FlickrCrawler project

FlickrCrawler 1.0 Released!

Features
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Archives photosets from a Flickr user's account

Browse archived Flickr sets without being connected to Flickr

Run Unattend - schedule a task and use the "/u" to have the archiver run overnight while you sleep

Maximum Threads - specify how many concurrent connections are allowed. Prevents overloading Flickr with too many connections (defaulted to 10)


System Requirements
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Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework


Known Limitations
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Need to be able to connect to Flickr (not all functions work disconnected)


Download
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You can download the setup package from the Codeplex project page

FlickrSync != FlickrCrawler

While researching this project, I came across a great application called FlickrSync. I thought this applicataion might be the answer to my problem, but I found that there's a fundamental difference between FlickrSync and FlickrCrawler:

The short explanation:

FlickrSync = Local PC -> Flickr.com
FlickrCrawler = Flickr.com -> Local PC

The long explanation:

FlickrSync - I highly recommend this great application if you want to manage photos locally, and synchronize with Flickr.

FlickrCrawler - This application is designed to archive your photos from Flickr to store and view them locally.

So basically, if you like using Flickr's tools to manage and organize your photos, you want to use FlickrCrawler to synchronize your local PC with Flickr. This is designed as an archival tool, not a management tool you stil use Flickr tools to manage your photos.

I think FlickrCrawler will be useful also to download comments and other statistics that Flickr accumulates over time.

FlickrCrawler 1.0 is under development!

My wife was worried that Flickr was going to somehow dissappear from the earth and all of her photos would be lost, so i built this tool to archive her photo sets.


Right now, this is a single use, web-based tool in the development stages, but in the coming weeks/months i will be converting it to a .NET windows application so it can be used from any desktop.

The tool just uses the Flickr API to crawl the user's sets and download the images. The result is a browsable, Flickr-like interface that can be burned to a DVD and viewed using any HTML browser (IE / Firefox).

This blog will track the development and become the knowledge base for this application.