FlickrDL is a command line tool for downloading flickr images, including their corresponding metadata.
Yes, there are other Flickr downloaders - even ones with a GUI. But first, I'm a command line fanboy. Second, most of the time, the other download tools did not download the images' metadata (author, license, source URL, etc.). This is a nuisance if you are assembling a presentation (or some other document which will go public) and you want to give proper credits to images licensed in the Creative Commons.
For compilation, you need a working gradle environment (get more information here: http://gradle.org/). In order to create the standalone jar file, run
gradle dist
flickrdl is able to embed the images' metadata in the EXIF/IPTC section of the image. This is done by calling one of the following external tools:
If one of these two programs is found in the current PATH, it will be used automatically. If none of them is installed, the only possibility to store the metadata is the creation of a sidecar file.
In order to run the program, just call
java -jar flickrdl.jar parameters
The program requires you to configure your personal flickr API key. You can create one on the flickr homepage: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.api_keys.html
After that, configure flickrdl with it using the "-a" parameter. You have to do this only once, it will be stored in your user configuration.
In order to download images, just append the images' numbers as parameters. The image number is part of the flickr URL:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/username/imagenumber/
Use the "-s" parameter to create a corresponding sidecar file for each image containing its metadata.
Copyright (C) 2011 by Stefan Schlott
Published under the GNU Public License V2 (GPL-2)