Alternative Flickr uploader

The Flickr Uploadr app has a few limitations that make it unusable for my uses cases, namely:

• cannot specify title of the photos to match file names of the uploaded photos
  • this makes it easier to track the correspondence between Flickr photos and files on my hard drive
• the duplicate detection is inflexible. Flickr Uploader uses Flickr API parameter to detect duplicate photos. Once a photo is detected as duplicate, it will not be addded to the album being created. I want the photos still be present in the created album even though they are duplicate to some photos in the photostream.
• cannot upload videos
• retries failed upload operations (which seem to fail in Flickr infrastructure more often than not with HTTP 504 error codes with messages such as "CloudFront attempted to establish a connection with the origin, ...")

In short, there is not enough knobs to turn for me, hence the main module is named flickrknob.

Setup

python3 -m venv env
. ./env/bin/activate
pip install poetry
poetry install

Obtain credentials

Set up a Flickr App, and copy the key and secret into a .env file. The script will look here to obtain the credentials.

Your .env file should look like this, with <key> and <secret> replaced by the actual values:

FLICKR_KEY = "<key>"
FLICKR_SECRET = "<secret>"

Your access token will be stored in the ~/.flickr directory. Be sure you don't upload this folder or your .env file to a public repository.

Run

flickrUploader "album name" "photo directory"

This will upload photos from the top level of the photo directory (i.e. does not recurse) and assign them to the newly created album with album name.