flip backs photos stored on the ipernity photo sharing site up to local storage along with metadata suitable for exporting said photos to another photo sharing service. It is used in conjunction with my flop package to mirror my ipernity photos to flickr.
This program is not currently polished enough to be useful to a general audience; using it requires some programming skills. It is at best a tool for creating your own photo backup solution.
flip is written in the go language, it has only been tested with version 1.5.2 and above.
To obtain an API key for ipernity, one visits http://www.ipernity.com/apps/key/0 and obtains a noncommercial API key and API secret. These should be exported in your environment in IPERNITY_API_KEY and IPERNITY_API_SECRET respectively. They can also be placed into src/ipernity.go in the source tree. Ipernity API keys seem to last for a limited number of API calls before being declared invalid. I have many tens of thousands of photos on ipernity, and in order to download them all, I had to re-register several times to get new keys in order to download all my photos.
flip is intended to be run periodically; perhaps out of cron. It has a couple optional command line arguments, but by default, with no arguments, it incrementally downloads all photos uploaded to ipernity since the last time which it was run.
-startdoc #Allows you to specify the starting document to download from ipernity (1 is the first document in your account). The default if not specified is the first document which has not been downloaded before.-numdocs #Allows you to specify the number of documents to download. The default is all of the documents which have not been downloaded before.
The first time you run flip, and every time you update your API key, you will need to authorize the API key to your account. flip will display a message:
go to http://some/authorization/url/from/ipernity anmd grant the permissions, then press <ENTER>
Follow the link in the message with a web browser, grant the API key permissions to your account, press ENTER, and flip will continue. It will store your credentials in a file in the directory where you ran flip, ipernity_auth_token. If flip ever fails to authenticate to ipernity for some reason, you can delete this file and the application will go through the authentication procedure above again.
flip will download photos/movies/documents/etc. to the directory in which it was invoked. Each document will consist of itself (ie, ipernity_document_id.jpg) as well as a JSON metadata blob (ie, ipernity_document_id.json). flip also stores its persistent state in a file named ipernity_last_doc. This simply contains the number of the last document which was downloaded. Each document stored in ipernity gets a numeric document id. This is used for the filename and the metadata filename. The metadata stored by flop consists of the following:
- Docid - the ipernity document ID
- OriginalURL - the URL of the "original" (full) size document on ipernity
- OriginalSize - the size, in bytes, of the original document
- Ext - the filename extension of the original document (ie, .jpg, .mov)
- Media - the type of the document (ie, "movie", "photo", "document")
- Title - the title of the document
- Description - the description of the document
- Date - the date which the document was uploaded
- Albums - a list of photo album names which the document was placed in on ipernity
- FamilyVisible - is the document visible to users who are part of your circle of Family members
- FriendVisible - is the document visible to users who are part of your circle of Friends
- PublicVisible - is the document visible to all users
If flip reports an error, the usual reasons for which are network connectivity or some problem with ipernity, it is always safe to re-run it. It is designed to not damage your data.
An example run of flip on an account with 4056 documents, 4040 of which have been downloaded before, so 16 new documents will be downloaded:
ben@nederland:~/src/flip$ go run flip.go
startdoc: 0
numdocs: 0
total number of documents 4056
startdoc 4040
numdocs 16
totalnumdocs 4056
numpages 41
startdocpage 41 enddocpage 41
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Document metadata 0
Document metadata 10
downloading doc 0
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ben@nederland:~/src/flip$