Tristan Phillips's Blog

I recently purchased an iPod nano to add to my vast array of Apple goodies. In fact I purchased it on the day Steve Jobs died as a memento. When I bought it, I wanted to wear it as a watch. The new firmware has 18 watch faces, and you can get some pretty nice straps for it.

Anyway, “wouldn’t it be cool”, I thought to myself, if every time I synced the nano with my Mac, the latest photos from my (or people I follow) Flickr streams were automagically added to the nano’s photo library. A quick google revealed there were loads of Flickr download tools, but none so flexible as to satisfy my needs. Besides, I’m a geek and I like writing code…

I started to look into the Flickr API’s and soon realised everything I needed was right there, so I got coding. Within an hour or so I had come up with something pretty cool, a few more hours of tweaking and I now have a command line, cross platform application that will grab x number of photos from a list of peoples photo streams, store them in folders based on their tag names, and update every time the application is run. The app lets me specify whose streams I’m interested in, how many photos I want to grab from each stream, and what size I want.

Combine this app with a scheduled automator script and I have a folder that always contains the most recent photos from the streams I subscribe to.

A quick settings tweak in iTunes and those photos are now added to my Nano every time I plug it in. A few more settings and my screensaver drops a nice display of them when my computer is idle.

Setting the app to sync my Flickr streams to a folder in my DropBox and my streams really are available to me, wherever I am.

If you would like to get hold of the app, you can do so here.