Python Flickr API

Flickr is one of the most popular photo hosting websites on the planet. Their extensive API gives programmers plenty of opportunity to use Flickr any way they see fit.

The easy to use Flickr API has several interfaces written in Python, the best one created by Beej. I’ve been the maintainer for this interface since August 2007.

Features that set this Flickr API interface apart from other Python implementations:

• Extensive documentation, including usage examples.
• Support for uploading and replacing photos.
• Automatically keeps track of your authentication credentials. No need to pass them on every Flickr API call.
• Tab completion of all Flickr API functions in IPython.
• Caching framework.
• Support for different communication protocols, such as REST and JSon.
• Different XML parsers to suit your taste and platform.

• Download latest version
• Documentation
• Changelog
• Bugs & feature requests

Installation

If your Linux distribution ships the package python-flickrapi try installing that. At least Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora ship with my Python Flickr API package. It probably won’t be the latest and greatest, but it’s easy to install.

This is by far the easiest method to get the latest Python Flickr API installed:

pip install flickrapi

You can then always update to the latest version using:

pip install -U flickrapi

As an alternative you can install from source. Get the source archive, extract it and run setup.py:

tar zxvf flickrapi-(version).tar.gz
cd flickrapi-(version)
sudo python setup.py install

If you get an error about “sudo” not existing as a command, try it without the “sudo”.

The development version of the source is stored in a Git repository at GitHub.

Documentation

The documentation is hosted here, and is also included in the source code.