Add "sync" command

[sebastienbarre]

Instagram's very own "Share to Flickr" feature has been broken for a while now. Let's implement that functionality as a new "sync" command. This will likely involve:

• finding out which Instagram pics to upload to Flickr, based on the last picture uploaded to Flickr, either by matching captions, searching for a uploaded:by:ragamints machine tag, or through an option passed by the user;
• downloading the Instagram high-res pics, adding the EXIF metadata, before uploading (already done by the "download" command)

Consider tagging on Instagram those pics that shouldn't be synced (#nosync).

[sebastienbarre]

Machine tags should be added before uploading to Flickr.

Machine tags have a namespace, a predicate and a value. The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to ('geo', 'flickr', etc.) The predicate is name of the property for a namespace ('latitude', 'user', etc.) The value is, well, the value. See hierarchies too.

• uploaded:by= e.g. ragamints
• instagram:id= Instagram ID of the media
• instagram:user_id= Instagram ID of the user associated to the media
• geo:lat= a valid latitude, in decimal format
• get:long= a valid longitude, in decimal format
• geo:tz= a valid timezone, if any

[sebastienbarre]

That command should probably be qualified, since we could sync to multiple services. Ideally:

• sync:flickr for Flickr, using Pomax/node-flickrapi
• sync:tumblr for Tumblr, using tumblr/tumblr.js (low priority)

[sebastienbarre]

ON JUNE 1, 2016 INSTAGRAM SEVERELY RESTRICTED WHAT ANY THIRD-PARTY INSTAGRAM APPLICATION CAN DO.

It is very unfortunate that Instagram decided to turn their back on developers. Tools such as ragamints are now considered invalid use cases and constrained to a Sandbox mode. This effectively blocks most of ragamints functionalities. You will need to generate a new access token, which will grant you access to your 20 most recent media, with reduced API rate limits. That's about it. You will no longer be able to download photos from other Instagram accounts, perform searches, or access any of your photos past the first 20.

In light of these changes, it seems only the most recent 20 photos from Instagram will be subject to sync.

[singlemamaco]

HI Sebastien. Does this functionality exist for any of the other platforms, such as Facebook, Flickr, Google+ (which have open api's unlike instagram)? I'm looking for something that can pull more than just the images but also capture the caption or post content and save it in the metadata when downloading images. Thank you for your help.

[sebastienbarre]

@amymadeline the Flickr API can still do it, the last time I checked. flickr.photos.getInfo will return the caption and more, flickr.photos.getExif will return EXIF/TIFF/GPS tags, etc. There is no 20 pictures limit, but maybe that will change now that Flickr has been sold. I would highly recommend saving your Flickr metadata to disk once you have retrieved them, something I should have done for my Insta pics -- I didn't fully grasp the nature of the restriction until it was too late.