Rob’s FlickR Importer is a custom plug-in I created for WordPress. It allows me to import images that I exported from my FlickR account.
FlickR Download
FlickR allows its users to download all of their content to their own computer. They provide several “zip” files (depending on how much content a person has). The zip files contain images, as “jpeg” files, and textual content, as “json” files.
The contents of the zip files can all be unzipped into a single directory. All the files have unique names, so there are no name conflicts. They’re separated to handle the large download size. My plug-in can read these files, after they are placed in a special sub-directory of the WordPress installation’s ( “wp-content/uploads/robs-flickr-importer”).
Processing
For each FlickR page (one per image) the plug-in creates a WordPress post and attachment (WordPress’s term for an uploaded image). The attachment is included in the post (which is designated the parent). The attachment is designated as the “feature image” of the post. The post contains the description that was on the FlickR image page, plus some meta data, like fave counts, and upload date. The “post date” of the WordPress post is set to the “date taken” of the FlickR image.
Results
Due to the change in context (location and time) and technical difficulties with the source format (some bad location data seems to exist, when none was entered) there are some minor errors in the resulting WordPress posts. Of course, writing original posts in WordPress by hand, would produce a higher quality result, but when one has huge numbers of images, this is not practical.
This plug-in is not a gallery generator. It’s a blog importer. So, the results are good only if you want your FlickR stream to be seen as a blog. I plan on adding some improved viewing options in the future.
Availability
Please check out the results, and feel free to comment or to share your suggestions. You can contact me at thivierr@gmail.com. I may share the source code, after I have had a better chance to review security and re-usability of the plug-in.