table of contents
flickrfs(1) | General Commands Manual | flickrfs(1) |
NAME¶
flickrfs - virtual filesystem for flickr online photosharing serviceABOUT¶
Flickrfs is a virtual filesystem which mounts on your linux machine like any other partition. Once mounted, it retrieves information about your photos hosted on your flickr account, and shows them as files. You can now easily copy photos from your local machine to this mount, and it will automatically upload them to your flickr account. Similary, you can copy the files from your mount to your local machine, and it will download your images from flickr.USAGE¶
Configuration¶
The first time you run flickrfs a directory .flickrfs is created in your $HOME directory. The directory contains a file named config.txt. Edit the file, to set the following options:[configuration]
browser:/usr/bin/x-www-browser
image.size:1024x768
sets.sync.int:300
stream.sync.int:300
add.default.tag:yes
APIKey:f8aa9917a9ae5e44a87cae657924f42d
Secret:3fbf7144be7eca28
Create a screen terminal (Optional)¶
What is screen? See screen(1)Mount the filesystem¶
Check if fuse module has already been loaded in kernel.First time you are mounting the fs, you need to close all the browser windows. Secondly, if you are behind a proxy server, set you http_proxy environment variable in the command line.
See flickrfs in action (Optional)¶
If you wish, you can view exactly what is flickrfs doing, by checking out the log file present in $HOME/.flickrfsUnmount the fs¶
To unmount the filesystem, execute the following commandStructure¶
Flickrfs Home Directory $HOME/.flickrfs:¶
- config.txt:
- Allows you to set the default image size, and the time interval for the syncing of /sets and /stream to flickr online server.
- log:
- log file which keeps record of activity going on in
flickrfs. Useful for debugging purposes. In case you find a bug, post it
along with this file on the mailing list.
The filesystem mount point contains these following folders by default:¶
/sets¶
/sets folder contains your sets, including your private photos. You can easily add/delete sets using standard linux commands./tags (contains /tags/personal and /tags/public)¶
/tags/personal folder allows search based upon tags in your photostream. Just create a folder (use mkdir) whose name is a colon delimited tags like 'tag1:tag2:tag3', and the fs will search your photostream to match all the photos which contain ALL these tags, and show them as files inside the directory./stream (not created by default)¶
/stream folder will contain ALL the photos that are present and accessible in your photostream. Obviously these wd also include photos from your sets.Feature List and Usage¶
Integration with Berkeley DB - Minimal hardware resource consumption by flickrfs¶
flickrfs has been integrated with Berkeley DB using python's bsddb module. Which means flickrfs would now store the image information in Berkeley db database, instead of storing it in memory. Let come millions of images, flickrfs would still consume only negligible amounts of RAM. Regarding hard disk space, it would be in order of 10s of Megabytes; not an issue for today's computers.Performance increase¶
flickrfs retrieves the sets information in parallel, background threads. Hence, the directory structure is created quickly, allowing users to start working. If some sets couldn't be retrieved the first time, they'd be taken care of when *syncing* kicks in.Robust execution of flickr operations on small bandwidth¶
Flickr operations, as in, interactions with flickr server are now fail-safe. flickrfs handles the URLError exceptions thrown by the operation, checks its result, and retries the operation multiple times in case of failure. Thus, even if connection is lost temporarily, flickrfs would continue its operations unaffected.config file would be automatically created¶
config.txt file, present in ~/.flickrfs would be created automatically, if not present. Normally the default values would be fine, but feel free to change it according to your needs.Bandwidth information of flickr account¶
statfs system call is now tied to the bandwidth usage information of your flickr account. You can view it by running aAutomatic periodic syncing of fs with online server.¶
flickrfs will automatically sync any changes done directly through flickr web interface/organizer or any other third party apps, to its local mount dynamically. This include changes to your /sets and /stream. The photos present in /tags are not synced, simply because /tags is meant just for searching/downloading purposes. The time interval can be specified through config.txt file. The default interval specified is 10 mins.Directly link photos from your stream or tags to sets, without downloading.¶
Use your ln command to directly add a photo present in your /stream to a set.Automatic resizing of photos while uploading.¶
NOTE: This does not affect the original photo. Only a copy is resized, and uploaded.Unicode Support¶
More robust unicode support. This feature is still in testing mode, so if you find any bug, feel free to contact us.Change photo meta data¶
Title, Description, Tags, License: Use meta data file associated to photo. For photo named img1_ID.jpg, the meta data file will be updated to the servers.Uploading¶
Copy the image to either /sets/yourset or /stream, with the directoy name as follows:Deleting¶
Flickrfs doesn't allow/do deletion of photos. It is to prevent a 'rm *' accident!Searching¶
To search your personal photos for tags: tag1, tag2 and tag3; create a directory in /tags/personal:Downloading¶
Copy the image from the mount to your local harddisk, and the original size of the image will be downloaded. If original size if not present, the accessible largest size of the photo will be downloaded.Switch Account¶
If you wish to switch account, just delete the folder $HOMEDIR/.flickr. This will remove your cache, and ask for authentication next time you mount the fs.Flickrfs User Guide Online¶
Please visit <http://manishrjain.googlepages.com/flickrfs> to read more about flickrfs usage and features.AUTHOR¶
This manual page was written by Varun Hiremath <varunhiremath@gmail.com>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).November 6, 2006 |