What to do with my downloaded JSON files from Flickr?
February 7, 2019 5:08 PM   Subscribe

I want to re-upload 32,000 images to my Flickr Pro account, but I don't know how to save the information (tags, title, description) contained in the corresponding JSON files. Can someone explain to me if this is possible, and if so, how?

In light of Flickr paring down their free accounts, I've just finished downloading about 32,000 images from an old free account on Flickr.

To do so, I used the program flickr downloadr which downloaded all of the images, and then a corresponding JSON file for each of the images (so I have 31,793 JPG files, and 31,793 corresponding JSON files that are named like this: 38781726781.jpg.json).

The JSON files contain the textual information about each image: Flickr Tags, Description, and Title.

When opened in a text editor, the JSON files look like this:

{"Tags":"thursday november 30th 2017 best","Description":"Picnic at the park","Title":"2017-11-30 11.16.30 DSC_0480"}

I want to re-upload the 32,000 images to my Flickr Pro account, but I don't know how to save the information contained in the corresponding JSON files—so that I won't lose the valuable information the JSON files contain when the images are re-uploaded.


If there's a way to embed the info into the JPG, or if there's a special way or app or script that I can use that will grab both the JPG and the JSON file and upload both to Flickr so that the textual information is paired with the JPG on Flickr?

I am on a Mac.
posted by blueberry to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
If there's a downloader, is there a corresponding uploader program ?

Looking at their API, there seems to be an upload method that takes the same inputs as you get back from the download method. An uploader would take those JSON and the file path to the JPG/picture and POST it (viz auth and error handling etc) -- a simple replay of what was downloaded. That feels like a few lines of Python or $your_favorite_scripting_language and bob's your uncle.

That said, can you migrate the free account to the pro account and avoid this ? Or did you create a brand new pro acct ? (and can you associate accounts in flickr ?) -- that might be the easier way (than re-uploading everything)
posted by k5.user at 6:28 AM on February 8

With ExifTool and some code one can read the JSON then write (embed) the info in the JPG.
posted by Homer42 at 7:03 AM on February 8

I spent some time doing something similar. In my case I was downloading from Flickr's own export tool to upload to Google Photos. It's mostly gone OK but I did discover the Geo tags in Flickr's data export are bogus. Well, some of them are.

Anyway, your problem is you need a custom upload program for Flickr. It's totally possible to use the Flickr API to do what you want, but I don't know of an off-the-shelf program that can do it. It's possible there might be something that works using Lightroom or Apple Photos as an intermediary. Import from the Flickr dump with magic tool that knows how to read the metadata from the JSON, then export back up to Flickr. I just don't know if that magic tool exists.
posted by Nelson at 8:31 AM on February 8

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