Earlier this month I mentioned going all in with Google Photos. Part of that process was doing a full export of my photos and videos from Flickr and importing them into Google Photos.
The Flickr Export
After looking around at options I eventually settled upon this version of flickrtouchr.py to do the export. Background about this code is on a post here.
This worked fine with one exception. It used .jpg as the extension for all of the files, even the videos. I didn’t realized this until the export was done. So I whipped up a simple Bash script to change the extension on the video files to .mov:
[sourcecode lang=”bash”]
#!/bin/bash
cd $1
for file in *
do
filename=$(basename $file)
filename="${filename%.*}"
mimetype=$(file –mime-type -b "$file")
case $mimetype in
video/quicktime)
mv -v "$filename.jpg" "$filename.mov"
;;
esac
done
[/sourcecode]
In the end I had nearly 7,000 files from my Flickr account.
Importing To Google Photos
I started with using the web based uploader, since it worked fine for the one off items in the past. Turns out the web uploader sometimes fails to upload an item. It tells you about the failure, but doesn’t make it easy to re-try ( let alone re-try automatically ).
I gave up on web uploader and switched to the Google Photos “Desktop Uploader” Mac App. If you need to upload a large number of items to Google Photos the Desktop Uploader is the way to go, don’t bother with anything else.
There is one item that you need to be careful with when using the Desktop Uploader. It will use every drop of bandwidth you have, with no rate limiting options. I ended up letting it run over night, when nothing else was using the Internet connection at home.
Conclusion
After several experiments with other options, I’m happy with the process I outlined above. It isn’t perfect, but it does get the job done.