Trying to download an overly large Flickr album that is not my own

December 25, 2020 9:41 AM

My wedding photos are up on flickr, there are 670 of them in a single ablum. How do I get them down without buying an app for a single use?

We got married about two and a half years ago and decided to put together wedding photo books for our parents recently. It turns out that the complete downloads of all the photos was on an old computer. So I'm looking to re-download them. I know I found a way to download them in batches of about 100 before. But I can't figure out how I did it last time. The recommended tools for bulk downloading either no longer work (download them all), are focused on downloading from your own account (flickr downloadr), or want me to buy the premium edition (bulkr).

I have read that I cannot copy to album into a separate account and that if I went and bugged our photographer, that she could not either. So I'm stuck with Flickr's interface that seems designed to lock the photos away on their service exclusively forever. How do I do get around this?

(I have thought of trying to write a custom python script for this, but my coding ability is such that it'd be quicker to just individually download the images than to write the code.)

posted by Hactar to Technology (4 answers total)

The photos are in an album that belongs to someone else, yes? And is that someone your photographer? And do they still have access to the account? Because it's obviously easier if they can download the images from their own Flickr account, but there are some pre-built Flickr scrapers that can get stuff based on, I think, a search using the API. So that is useful if there's some way to grab them all, I don't know much about the API but seems like it would work? Likewise if the photographer has access to IFTTT they could, I think, move those photos to a Google drive owned by, or accessible by, you.
posted by jessamyn at 9:52 AM on December 25, 2020

Do you have the old computer? Could you mount the hard drive from that as an external hard drive to your current computer and simply copy them over or grab the photos you want from that hard drive?

Could you pay your photographer to put all the photos on a CD or drive for you?
posted by AugustWest at 11:53 AM on December 25, 2020

I dunno, $29 for bulkr seems like a small price to pay to get this done easily.
posted by beagle at 1:01 PM on December 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

If you're happy fiddling with Python, here's a script I wrote a few years ago for downloading Flickr albums with flickrapi.
posted by offog at 4:59 PM on December 25, 2020