Flickr

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Flickr is a photo and video hosting silo founded in 2004 that some in the IndieWeb community have posted to and/or currently use as a POSSE destination.

Why

Why POSSE

Why POSSE to Flickr in particular?

Tantek Çelik: I noticed that my Flickr photos get some notable re-use due to better discoverability of Flickr photos, and CC licensing. Thus to encourage more notable re-use, I am POSSEing my photos to Flickr, and selectively make them public.

How to

How to export your data

There are various tools for exporting your photos, comments, tags, and favorites from Flickr. Please document such tools here.

Direct Export

From one's account page, Flickr offers a one-click tool that will email you a link for data download.

You can use this tool to download the information that Flickr has about your account, including account preferences, profile information, and your photos and videos. This process will take some time, so we’ll send you an email when it’s ready for you to download.

Using Flickr Camera Roll

This method exports the photos only, no meta information like tags and albums. Open https://www.flickr.com/cameraroll and you should see all of your photos. You can click-and-drag to select multiple photos. At the bottom of the page will be options for the selected photos. Click "Download" and you will be prompted to save a zip file of the selected photos. If you select a large amount of photos, it may automatically break them into separate zip files. I exported 841 photos on 2016-02-23 and it made two zip files. gRegor Morrill

Flickr Archiver

See Aaron Parecki's https://github.com/aaronpk/Flickr-Archiver

flickr-cli

flickr-cli by TheFox is a command-line PHP tool for uploading and downloading Flickr items. It's download function has an option to download all of a user's original files and save their metadata in YAML files.

Feeds

Flickr has numerous feeds to views of content that can be used to PESOS content from Flickr, or to backup recent content.

tag feeds

Flickr has publicly readable feeds of tagged photos: (e.g. photos tagged with "indiewebcamp")

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=indiewebcamp&lang=en-us&format=atom

user feeds

Flickr's feeds related to a specific user by opaque userid in the URL are also public, e.g. for userid 39039882@N00 (user: http://flickr.com/tantek ) :

photo/video posts from a user:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=39039882@N00&lang=en-us&format=atom

favorites of a user:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_faves.gne?nsid=39039882@N00&lang=en-us&format=atom

photos of a user: (people tagged)

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/profile_photos.gne?nsid=39039882@N00&lang=en-us&format=atom

activity feed

Flickr has a (totally undocumented?) feed of activity for the logged in user, where activity is anything you would normally be notified about in notifications (faves, comments, replies to photos you have replied on). To limit content to only photos in your own stream, add &activity_view=photostream

These require you to be logged in and redirect to a "secret" URL and may include activity on non-public photos.

WordPress Tool

2019-02-20 Chris Hardie wrote up how he used his own custom tool to export from Flickr and import into his own WordPress blog. The code is available on Github: Flickr Export to WordPress Import with reasonable instructions.

How to POSSE

You can POSSE the following to Flickr:

photos
videos
reply posts as comments on Flickr photos/videos (including POSSE reply-threading, when you reply to an indie photo/video that has a Flickr POSSE copy).
like posts as favorites on Flickr photos/videos (including POSSE favoriting, when you like an indie photo/video that has a Flickr POSSE copy).

Bridgy Publish POSSE

You can use Bridgy Publish to POSSE to Flickr since 2015-11-15 the following kinds of posts:

photos, videos, comments, and favorites. Photos may include tags (supported since 2016-01-08) and/or people tags.

Feature request for POSSEing tag-reply posts:

#857: support POSSEing tag reply to Flickr

How to backfeed from

If you POSSE to Flickr, you should backfeed all the responses to your Flickr POSSE copies. E.g.

Flickr favorite -> like
Flickr comment -> reply

Bridgy Backfeed

You can use Bridgy to backfeed favorites & comments from Flickr POSSE copies back to their originals since 2015-09-17.

Feature requests for backfeeding taggings:

IndieWeb POSSE backfeed examples

The following have gotten POSSE to Flickr working:

Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmüller with Known on werd.io since at least 2014-07-17 (fairly certain there are much earlier examples, thus leaving benwerd at top of list)

original photo post: http://werd.io/2014/homebrew-website-club-noir-at-mattervc-photo-by-museyapp-indieweb
POSSE Copy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/benwerd/14671472684/

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith with ACME on adactio.com since 2014-07-08, e.g.

original photo post: https://adactio.com/notes/7021
POSSE Copy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/14604446101

atomicules

atomicules using Jekyll combined with custom deploy/syndication scripts on atomicules.co.uk since 2015-08-15

original photo post: http://atomicules.co.uk/2015/08/15/Always-drink-irresponsibly.html
Flickr POSSE copy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/91098778@N00/20609426091

Tantek

Tantek Çelik using Falcon to automatically POSSE via Bridgy Publish since 2016-032 (manually since 2016-016, including all photos+videos from 2016-01) from tantek.com

original photo post: http://tantek.com/2016/032/t1/mothership-bowl-second-breakfast
- automatic Flickr POSSE copy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/24140238323/
  - all hashtags in original made it through to Flickr POSSE copy via p-category and Bridgy Publish support
original photo post: http://tantek.com/2016/001/t1/gregorian-january-lego-calendar
- manual Flickr POSSE copy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/23803704613/
- plain text tags were manually added to the POSSE copy after manual (via web UI) Bridgy Publish POSSEing of the photo
original video post: http://tantek.com/2016/001/t3/stay-tuned-building-your-future-indieweb (video)
- manual (via Bridgy Publish) Flickr POSSE copy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/24235088549/
  - revealed: "a video" text at start of caption (likely from video tag fallback) - Bridgy #612 (subsequently fixed)
  - revealed: # hashtags in caption did not make it to Flickr tags automatically (added manually afterwards)
    - fixed by marking them up as p-category in subsequent photo/video posts.

Features

Summary of Flickr's features:

account creation / management like typical silos
photo and video posts
- favorite and comment on those posts
post by email
...
... lots more features

Details of some specific features are provided in sections below.

Privacy

Location data has different privacy settings from the photos

Photos on Flickr have a privacy setting for seeing the photo itself, and a separate privacy setting for viewing the location of the photo. For example it is possible to set a photo to public, but have the location only visible to "Friends and Family".

Geofencing

Flickr allows you to configure one or more geofences around locations such as "home" or "work", and any time photos are uploaded that fall into that area, the geo privacy will be set automatically.[1]

Brainstorming

How to delete your account

TBD.

Has anyone deleted their Flickr account? What's the process? How long do they hold your data anyway? Etc.

Issues

PESOS unreliability

There has been some experience with a PESOS approach not working well with Flickr:

2014-10-05 @anomalily
Whoa, leveling up in the #indieweb world: about to switch from PESOS to POSSE for @flickr because PESOS is failing me

Recommendation: POSSE to Flickr instead of PESOS.

Two Pages About You

Users on Flickr have two pages "about" them:

/photos/username (also often works at just /username) - no link to your website, but shows your stream of recent photo posts, and has a rel-me link to your /people/username page:
/people/username - has rel-me support for linking back to your website. Shows a few recent photo thumbnails, recent photos of your, your recent favorites.

No other service splits your profile identity like this. Typical silos all have integrated profile pages that show both your latest posts and your profile information like your website.

Because of this, and because Flickr encourages linking to the /photos/username page, getting rel=me to work with Flickr is a bit more out-of-the-way work, but still doable.

Criticism

version 4.0 of the Flickr smartphone app now auto-syncs every picture and video by default, without asking, which raises serious privacy issues

Photo embed code requires Javascript (for the slideshow player) to even display any image. ( see http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2015-03-22#t1427012080693 )

Downtime

"Upload failures" a.k.a. untested impact of new features

2007-02-19 Flickr massage:

Other uses

Peter Molnar ended up using Flickr as a geotagging software due to it's relatively sophisticated drag-and-drop map organizer and to the lack of similar in linux land. The short summary is that once POSSEd photos are placed on the map in Flickr, this information can be exported and added to the local image file itself.

History

(stub section)

Flickr originally only supported photo posts
When Flickr added video posts they were limited to short (max 90sec) & small (max 150MB)
Bought by SmugMug 2018-04
- 2018-04-20 Jessica Guynn: Exclusive: Flickr bought by SmugMug, which vows to revitalize the photo service (archived)

Why