Flickr Mail

Tool lives here: https://edwardbetts.com/flickr_mail/

Flickr Mail is a Flask app that helps find Flickr photos for Wikipedia articles and contact photographers to request Wikipedia-compatible licensing.

What It Does

• Searches Flickr from a Wikipedia article title/URL
• Shows license status for each result (free vs non-free CC variants)
• Builds a ready-to-send Flickr message for non-free licenses
• Finds image-less articles in a Wikipedia category
• Shows recent Commons uploads that came from Flickr mail outreach

Project Layout

• main.py: Flask app routes and core logic
• templates/: UI templates
• download_sent_mail.py: sync Flickr sent messages into DB
• download_commons_contributions.py: sync Commons contributions into DB
• update_flickr_uploads.py: derive flickr_uploads from contributions/sent mail
• flickr_mail.db: SQLite database

Database Pipeline

The recent uploads section depends on a 3-step pipeline:

1. ./download_sent_mail.py updates sent_messages
2. ./download_commons_contributions.py updates contributions
3. ./update_flickr_uploads.py builds/updates flickr_uploads

main.py only reads flickr_uploads; it does not populate it.

UploadWizard Detection

update_flickr_uploads.py supports both Commons UploadWizard comment styles:

• User created page with UploadWizard (older)
• Uploaded a work by ... with UploadWizard (newer)

It first tries to extract a Flickr URL directly from the contribution comment. If absent, it falls back to Commons extmetadata.Credit.

Local Run

Install dependencies (example):

pip install flask requests beautifulsoup4 sqlalchemy

Start the app:

python3 main.py

Then open:

• http://localhost:5000/

Refresh Data

Run in this order:

./download_sent_mail.py
./download_commons_contributions.py
./update_flickr_uploads.py

Before running ./download_sent_mail.py, create local auth config:

cp download_sent_mail.example.json download_sent_mail.local.json

Then edit download_sent_mail.local.json and set cookies_str to your full Flickr Cookie header value.

Notes

• download_commons_contributions.py uses an overlap window of known-only batches before stopping to avoid full-history scans while still catching shallow gaps.
• If a known Commons upload is missing from flickr_uploads, re-run the full 3-step pipeline above.