Fortunately, I found Ipernity, which is the sort of community that I was looking for in Flickr. Perhaps Flickr used to be like that, but now - at least for me - it’s a pretty sterile environment with minimal engagement, and few technological advances in recent years.

Ipernity answers half my needs, but over the years I’ve been using Flickr as an on-line dumping ground for photographs, with over 4000 images that I don’t want to get rid of, and would like to have accessible on-line. I’ve had a career as an ‘IT guy’ so I’m fairly comfortable with software, if a bit rusty at writing my own, and I have a Mac Mini running as a multimedia server, so I decided to look at a self-hosted image gallery.

After trying out a few alternatives, I decided that Immich (https://immich.app) was going to meet my needs pretty well. After a bit of trial and error I got it running on the Mac, using Docker (https://www.docker.com) to take care of most of the installation and configuration. Once it was stable, I had a go at retrieving my photos from Flickr.

Flickr make it easy to get a copy of your images, but painful to port them elsewhere. For some reason, the site strips out all the useful EXIF metadata from the images and stores it separately. When you request your photos, Flickr processes for a few minutes or hours, and sends you a link to download a bunch of zip files, including a subdirectory of files in JSON format that relate to all the images in directories elsewhere.

With a bit of searching I found another open source utility called exfitool (https://exiftool.org) that manipulates the data, but it looked like it would take me quite a while to figure out how it works, and many hours to dust off my coding skills and write a program to merge everything. I decided to see if AI could help.

AI ‘chatbots’ and Large Language Models get a lot of well deserved bad press, but as a coding assistant they can be a huge timesaver. It took less than five minutes to describe what I wanted to the Claude AI (https://claude.ai/), with it asking a few clarification questions, after which it created nicely commented Python script that did the job flawlessly; even including a ‘dry run’ mode to test it before modifying any files.

My only outstanding problem is that the Flickr export mixes photographs from different albums into the export directories. There’s another JSON file that seems to contain the mapping, but with the time I’ve saved I’ve decided to restructure the albums manually and curate my collection a bit.

So, it turns out that self-hosting a Flickr alternative isn’t too tricky, and AI can really help in generating easy to follow instructions, and program code that would take a rusty human a lot of hours to get right.