Flickr allows you to download your photos and metadata. Unfortunatley, the metadata is not stored along with the images as EXIF, XMP, IPTC or other standard format; instead it will be downloaded as a series of JSON files, one per image.

This tool allows you to convert all these JSON files into a single CSV file according to the supplied mapping. The CSV file can then be used by ExifTool to update image EXIF/XMP/whatever metadata.

From the Flickr Settings page click Request my Flickr data. In a day or two you will receive an email with two links, one for the metadata archive and another for the image archive.

Extract the two archives, which will create two directories, one containing metadata and another containing images.

The process might look like this:

1. Update tag mapping (optional).

You can update the mapping of Flickr metadata properties to EXIF/XMP/IPTC image tags if you want. A sample mapping file, map.json is provided. Its input_tags properties contains a JSON array of strings that correspond to the Flickr metadata properties, and the output_tags array contains the image tags to be set. Output tags can contain group name, e.g. "EXIF:Make", following the ExifTool tag syntax.

Example input tag specifications and JSON they match:

• "name" Matches {"name": "foobar"}

• "exif.Make" Matches {"exif": {"Make": "samsung"}}

• "albums[0].name" Matches the name property of the first albums element, that is, will return "album1" given the following input: `{"albums": [{"name": "album1"}, {"name": "album2"}]}

• "tags[*].tag" Matches the tag property of all tags element then joins them in a single string, separated by spaces. This will return "foo bar" given the following input: `{"tags": [{"tag": "foo"}, {"tag": "bar"}]}

• "exif.Make=foobar" Supplies the default value for "exif.Make", that is, will return "foobar" if there is no Make in exif or if there's no exif.

2. Extract Flickr metadata.

Flickr metadata does not follow any standard image metadata format, and I'm using Phil Harvey's ExifTool to update image files. As the first step I convert Flickr metadata into a format ExifTool can consume -- a CSV file. This is where the Python program comes in.

PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 \
IMG_DIR=/path/to/image/files TAG_MAP=./map.json \
./meta2csv.py "/path/to/metadata/files/photo_*json" \
>/path/to/image/files/meta.csv

Note that you need to put the metadata file pattern in quotes to avoid the shell globbing.

For example:

PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 \
IMG_DIR=/Volumes/media/downloads/data-download-1 TAG_MAP=./map.json \
./meta2csv.py "/Volumes/media/downloads/flickr-export/meta/photo_*json" \
>/Volumes/media/downloads/data-download-1/meta.csv

Two environment variables that control the program behaviour are:

• IMG_DIR: Indicates the directory path where the actual image files have been extracted from the Flickr export. If not specified the current directory is assumed.

• TAG_MAP: Points to the customized tag map file. If not specified, the default mapping hard-coded in the program is used.

Set PYTHONIOENCODING if any of your Flickr metadata -- image titles, descriptions, tags etc. -- contain non-ASCII characters, otherwise Python stdout redirection will fail to print such characters.

3. Update image metadata with ExifTool.

Once the Flickr metadata is saved in a CSV file that can be understood by ExifTool, you can update the image files. The command below will read the CSV file created in the previous step, update each matching file's metadata with tags from that CSV file, and copy the file into a directory named after the Flickr album it belongs to.

It should run from the directory where image files have been extracted.

/path/to/exiftool -csv=<CSV file name> -e jpg -e png .

4. Separate images into albums.

Optionally you can now sort your images into directories based on the Flickr albums they were in. Note that if any of your images belongs to multiple albums on Flickr, only the first album will be used to set the image metadata in step 2 above.

/path/to/exiftool -'Directory<Album' -o %f.%e -e jpg -e png .

Note that this command will create a new subdirectory for each Flickr album; make sure that you run it from the directory where you want these album subdirectories to be created.