Flickr Data Scraper

A Python Data Scraper for Your Photostream

This is a Python script that uses the Flickr API to extract data and thumbnail images for all public photos uploaded by a specific Flickr user. The script stores this information in a pandas DataFrame and then writes it to an Excel file.

Technologies

This script requires the following packages to be installed:

• flickrapi
• pandas
• requests
• Pillow
• openpyxl

Instructions

1. Clone this repository to your local machine.
2. Install the required packages by running pip install -r requirements.txt.
3. Create a .env file in the project directory with your Flickr API key and secret in the following format:

   API_KEY = 'your_api_key'
   API_SECRET = 'your_api_secret'
   

4. Set the username variable in the script to the appropriate value for your Flickr account.
5. Run the script. It will retrieve the photo data and display a message indicating the number of photos that were retrieved.
6. After the photo data is added to the pandas DataFrame, a message will be printed indicating the number of rows of data that were added.
7. The script saves an Excel file in a subdirectory /data where the script is located. The Excel file is saved as flickrdata_YYYYMMDD.xlsx. If a file with the same name already exists in /data, a number will be added to the end of the filename to avoid overwriting the existing file.

Notes

• This script is designed to work with Python 3.7 or later.
• To run the script, execute it in a Python environment, such as Jupyter Notebook or Spyder.
• The script will automatically create the /data subdirectory if it does not already exist.
• The Flickr API has rate limits that may cause the script to fail if too many requests are made in a short period of time. If this happens, wait a few minutes before attempting to run the script again.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.