flickr-views-counter

Python script to count the total number of views across all of a user's photos. Flickr's API doesn't give a total photo count anymore, so this script makes use of this very helpful library to add up the counts for each photo and output the total number of views for a user.

Steps to setup script

1. Get a Non-commercial Flickr API key.
   • Fill out the form
   • Keep the page with your new key and secret open, you'll need them in a moment
2. Install Python, if you don't have it

3. Use pip to install the flickr-views-counter package

   pip install flickr-views-counter

Running the script

Run the script with your user id. For example, my user id is 26119226@N04, which is the last part of the url for my photostream https://www.flickr.com/photos/26119226@N04/.

So, I would run (replacing the Xs with my API key and the Ys with my API secret):

flickr-views-counter 26119226@N04 --key XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX --secret YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Storing API key and secret

If you don't want to use your key and secret every time you run the script, you can store them in environment variables. Make sure you use FLICKR_API_KEY to store the key and FLICKR_API_SECRET to store the secret. This guide may be helpful for setting environment variables.

Saving detailed data

If you want to save the data for your photos in csv format, then add an output file name. For example:

flickr-views-counter 26119226@N04 --output photo-views.csv

Get daily stats

If you're familiar with crontab, you can set the script up to save your daily photo statistics. Here is an example that would run at noon every day, write the csv output to a folder with the date stamp, and log the total counts. The actual implementation would vary slightly based on your paths, and, of course, your user id.

00 12 * * * flickr-views-counter 26119226@N04 --output ~/Desktop/flickr-counts/count-views-$(date +%F).csv >> ~/Desktop/flickr-counts/flickr-counts-log.txt

Options

-h, --help

Prints help message.

--output

Name of the output csv file to save photo data. Like, photo-views.csv

--key

Your Flickr API key

--secret

Your Flickr API secret

FAQ

Q: why isn't there a website to do this for me? A: The FlickrApi is rate limited to 3600 queries per hour, so a single API key wouldn't be able to handle requests for a large number of users