edward/flickr-mail
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flickr-mail/README.md
Edward Betts 08f5128e8d Add interaction logging and tighten model NOT NULL constraints 
Log searches (article/category) and message-generation events to a new
interaction_log table, capturing IP address and User-Agent.

Also apply NOT NULL constraints to Contribution, SentMessage, FlickrUpload,
and ThumbnailCache fields that are always populated, and remove stale
continue_token references from category.html.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-02-08 12:34:04 +00:00

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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.

Interaction Logging

The app logs searches and message generation to the interaction_log table:

  • search_article: when a user searches for a Wikipedia article title (page 1 only)
  • search_category: when a user searches a Wikipedia category
  • generate_message: when a non-free CC message is generated for a photo

Each row records the timestamp, interaction type, client IP (from X-Forwarded-For if present), User-Agent, query, and (for message events) the Flickr and Wikipedia URLs.

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.