OTFG Step 2: Thinking about Photo URLs
My next step in moving my photos from Flickr to my own server was thinking about where I would store the photo files. Flickr assigns every photo a numeric ID which is available in every photo URL. For example, here's the URL of one of my photos hosted on Flickr:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/124/359119647_4874f02815_o.jpg
The URL doesn't give much information about the photo. We know that the photo is at a flickr.com server, and that the photo is a user's original photo (note the
Since I'm hosting my own photos, I thought I'd put a bit more information into the photo URLs. I decided to go with this format for original, unresized images:
http://example.com/[year]/[month]/[photo title].jpg
This means the same photo on my server will have a URL like this:
http://example.com/2007/01/beach-dogs.jpg
Though I don't expect my photo URLs to be exposed in the wild very much, I like this structure because it provides a bit of context. And because I'll be using actual directories in the filesystem named /2007 and /01, for example, the filesystem should scale well. I won't have hundreds and hundreds of photos in one folder. On the other hand, it will make running batch operations on all of the photos a bit tougher because I'll have to recurse through the directories—but that shouldn't be a big deal. (Especially since all of the file locations will be stored in the db.)
The Flickr API provides the date and time a photo was added to their system in Unix time, and the PHP
I simply set a starting directory in my import script that's available through the web server, say,
Using the title of a photo as the file title is a bit tricky, because the titles are meant to be read by humans, not used in the filesystem. Photo titles contain punctuation and spaces, so I just strip all of that out with some regular expressions. I'm sure this could be improved, but I'm using:
Basically this bit of code says replace any whitespace in the title with a dash, and then remove any character that isn't a dash or isn't standard letters and numbers. A bit rough, but it should handle most standard English titles.
With the photo-URL planning out of the way, it was time to set up Flickr API access for my import script. I'll show how that works in Step 3.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/124/359119647_4874f02815_o.jpg
The URL doesn't give much information about the photo. We know that the photo is at a flickr.com server, and that the photo is a user's original photo (note the
_o at the end of the filename). Other than that, pretty anonymous.
Since I'm hosting my own photos, I thought I'd put a bit more information into the photo URLs. I decided to go with this format for original, unresized images:
http://example.com/[year]/[month]/[photo title].jpg
This means the same photo on my server will have a URL like this:
http://example.com/2007/01/beach-dogs.jpg
Though I don't expect my photo URLs to be exposed in the wild very much, I like this structure because it provides a bit of context. And because I'll be using actual directories in the filesystem named /2007 and /01, for example, the filesystem should scale well. I won't have hundreds and hundreds of photos in one folder. On the other hand, it will make running batch operations on all of the photos a bit tougher because I'll have to recurse through the directories—but that shouldn't be a big deal. (Especially since all of the file locations will be stored in the db.)
The Flickr API provides the date and time a photo was added to their system in Unix time, and the PHP
date() function converts that to any format. So as my import script grabs photos from the Flickr server, it puts the image in the local filesystem based on the time it was added to Flickr originally.
I simply set a starting directory in my import script that's available through the web server, say,
/www/photos/ or c:\\www\\photos\\ in Windows, and it will create the necessary local directories as it pulls in photos from Flickr.
Using the title of a photo as the file title is a bit tricky, because the titles are meant to be read by humans, not used in the filesystem. Photo titles contain punctuation and spaces, so I just strip all of that out with some regular expressions. I'm sure this could be improved, but I'm using:
$photoTitle_f = preg_replace('/\s+/', '-', $photoTitle_f);
$photoTitle_f = preg_replace('/[^-\w]/', '', $photoTitle_f);
Basically this bit of code says replace any whitespace in the title with a dash, and then remove any character that isn't a dash or isn't standard letters and numbers. A bit rough, but it should handle most standard English titles.
With the photo-URL planning out of the way, it was time to set up Flickr API access for my import script. I'll show how that works in Step 3.