Earlier this year, Flickr locked its automatic uploading feature that pulls image files off an SD card and automatically uploads them to Flickr behind a paywall. If you don’t want to shell out the $US5.99 ($8)/month for that, GitHub user drcursor has a solution that uses a Raspberry Pi.
Essentially, all you’re doing here is making a simple Python script that will upload all the photo files from a USB drive to Flickr (with the viewing set to private) when it’s connected to the Pi. When it’s done, the script sends you an email to say it’s ready then unmounts the storage device. It’s a very simple little program, but if you’re annoyed at Flickr’s paywall but still use the service, this is a nice way around it.
Flickrup [GitHub via Hacker News]
Comments
2 responses to “Build Your Own Flickr Automatic Uploader With A Raspberry Pi”
We do something like this with our weather station in Sydney 🙂 It’s driven by a raspberry pi that takes pictures every couple of seconds and saves them in network storage (and also runs weather station software to collect observations). Then another server connected to that storage uses a simple Flickr upload shell script (https://github.com/ohookins/flickr-shell-uploader) to send them to Flickr with curl. We also uses ffmpeg to automatically (and on demand) stitch the image sup into videos and upload the videos to YouTube using a Python script. It all works pretty well!
The one downside—and this might not be true of the Pi 3; I tested it with the 2—is that the Pi wasn’t really powerful enough to upload the images to Flickr itself. We found that the transfers took a while and tended to max out the CPU, so it started screwing up the picture taking process unless we slowed it down to one every thirty seconds (which we didn’t want to do, as it was timelapse). Needless to say, running ffmpeg to build the videos on the Pi was out of the question.