I found a user whose photos on flickr, the photo-sharing site (now owned by Yahoo) I really like. After discovering a little batch of his pictures, I realized that he had a ton more online — soon I longed to check them out. On my terms.
That requirement encompasses a set of necessities: The short version being that I needed them on my PC. Understand that I am not trying to steal or modify the photos in any way: I just want to have the freedom to view them as I please, not as how flickr allows or dictates me to do. Since I love the photos I truly revere their author; the last thing I want to do is any harm to that person!
Anyway, as one can imagine, flickr doesn't like you to download its pictures in batch. Particularly if they are copyrighted. In fact, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome were you trying to do so. Which is, in a way, understandable. But I, being a computer scientist who means no harm, know that if there is a way to view the photos on your screen, you can save them on your hard drive. Scripting such a task, on the other hand, might be a little more difficult. The hurdles I was talking about also hinder you doing such a thing.
So I started looking around for tools which do just that. Uploading is not an issue. As isn't downloading your own pictures. After searching around a bit, one can find tools which — after having linked the program with your account — through flickr's APIs can even download photos marked as openly accessible.
Funny thing is, several of the tools I found (and tried) were very ccreatively named: "flickr downloadr" is the name to at least a dozen programs doing the exact same thing (more or less successfully)… You can be glad if you find such a tool with a different name: At least you could tell them apart!
But, alas, of course I chose the more difficult option.
My chosen photographer of choices marked his photos as "copyrighted", which means the just mentioned tools wouldn't work. The API will not allow that. Even more, since one photo contained some (extremely mild) nudity (as I later discovered), the whole account was marked as "R-rated" or something, since it asked me a couple of times if I were sure I wanted to watch the photos or "return to the kittens" (no kidding: that's what the warning said). So I was afraid that even if I found an "illegal" tool that downloaded a bunch of photos marked as copyrighted, it would fail (probably miserably) because of this further restriction.
I digged deeper into Google, and found several workarounds/scripts/apps that promised to do just that — but apparently flickr is working just as hard fighting those. As a matter of fact, most of the tools I found were quite outdated (as far back as 2007, IIRC). It must have been easier to circumvent flickr's safeguards that far back. Finally, I found a more "modern" tool which caught my eye because its last update wasn't even a week away: Saleen Flickr Downloader (note that it seems that even the developers haven't quite figured out a unified way to name their product…). I had struck gold!
This program has one extremely clever and ingenious — and yet simple, as for most elegant solutions to a problem — feature that made it everything I was searching for (even though I didn't know it beforehand): It basically is a simple web browser. A browser exclusive to flickr.
Just like that, the program can preempt flickr's any and all warning. Basically, you use this "sub-browser" to log into flickr, surf to the desired photos/user/set, answer every question flickr might pose (like the "R-rated" thing) and then starts doing its work. Remember how I said if you could view it on your screen, you could save it on your hard drive? Well that's exactly what it does. By being a browser, the program inserts itself on the last possible step before delivering the picture to your screen, while still working its magic way after any checks that flickr might have built in. It's so effective, it's perfection. Incredible.
So, after logging in, locating the user in question, and making flickr happy with all its requests, warnings, and whatnots, I advised the program to start downloading all the pictures. And finally, after way longer than anticipated, I could enjoy those beautiful pictures.
