http://norman.walsh.name/2006/12/06/flocl 9 120 2006-12-06T09:18:57-05:00 $Date: 2006-12-06 09:34:49 -0500 (Wed, 06 Dec 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh Flocl: a local copy of your Flickr photostream. What happened was, last year, I went to England to visit my folks. Before I went, I was sure that they'd want to see photographs from family events and recent trips. No problem, just grab the external drive onto which I archive photographs and…hold on a moment. I made the mistake once of trying to use every photograph that I took on a particular trip as a kind of photo album/slide show/scrap book. It was a disaster of the sort you see parodied on television where some poor family is subjected to eleven hours of the neighbor's vacation slides. I knew not to make that mistake again. Thinking about how to cull the collection, I realized that the easiest way to discriminate between the entire set of photographs and a more reasonable subset of interesting ones was to take the photographs that I'd uploaded to Flickr. It was pretty easy to cobble together a Perl script with one of the Flickr API modules that could find and download all my images. Trouble is, that results in an essentially random arrangement of photographs; there's no rhyme or reason to the names of the images. I did my best, with images from norman.walsh.name and a some desperate Perl hacking, but it was very unsatisfying. Fast forward a year or so and I'm just about to head off to England again. And I've got the same problem again. But this time, I invested a weekend in building a better solution. I started by updating my XSL Flickr library and then I wrote three tools to get the job done. I wrote getflickr.xsl to construct an XML document that contains all of the information about a Flickr photostream that's available from the public APIs. I wrote backupflickr to download all of the images in that photostream. And I wrote flocl.xsl to build a set of web pages that expose an interface on the local backup images that's inspired by the sorts of things that the Flickr site provides: access to images, sets, tags, and even pools (only your images in each pool, of course). Then, because information wants to be free, I dropped it all on so the next person doesn't have to reinvent this particular wheel. There's a sample online, so you don't actually have to install it to see what it looks like. This may be a good thing: the instructions I wrote for installing and using Flocl haven't had much of a shakedown. I've tried to make the HTML pages valid and I've used class names and CSS to do most of the layout. I don't claim any particular skill as a graphic designer so if someone's inspired to give the design a little boost with more sophisticated CSS, that'd be cool. Otherwise, I think it's pretty complete. Share and enjoy.