Flickr to Google Photos
I’ve had a Flickr account since forever. Even had a pro account for several years till Yahoo bought out Flickr. But over the years, my usage of Flickr had dropped off to near zero. So when SmugMug, the new owners of Flickr, announced changes to how they’ll be operating Flickr, it made me realize that I don’t have much need for the account anymore.
However, I had spent an enormous amount of time over the years organizing & geo-tagging my photos in Flickr. I wanted to retain that information as much as possible.
With that goal in mind, I wrote Flickr to Google Photos, a couple of utilities that import albums from Flickr into Google Photos.
Flickr provides a complete data dump through their Request my Flickr Data option in account settings. This data dump includes all the photos and videos that you ever uploaded to Flickr, as well as lots of json files describing all of your albums, comments, and other activity on Flickr.
Google Photos provides a basic API to create albums and upload photos.
I combined the two with some Python scripts that help achieve the following:
- Update the EXIF metadata in photo files with the geo-tagging information in the Flickr json metadata. This enables Google Photos to correctly geo-tag uploaded photos.
- For each Flickr album, recreate the album in Google Photos and upload the contained photos and videos.
- Set the album description, album cover photo, and photo description, as best as the API allows.
Hope this bit of code will be useful to someone else too.