Automated Bulk Uploading of Images and Metadata to Flickr

Abstract

The Digital Initiatives department at Miami University, like most digital initiatives and special collections departments, has a large number of rich digital image collections, stored primarily in a third-party database. Typically, these databases are not findable to the average Web user. From a desire to expose these collections to the wider Web environment, thoughts immediately turned to Flickr, the most prominent Web site for image discovery and sharing. The problem was scale: the default uploading interface was too inefficient for the project. A set of PHP scripts were developed, devised to interact with Flickr's application programming interface to allow for quick and efficient uploading of images as well as metadata such as titles, subjects, tags, and hyperlinks back to the collections. Once the scripts were in place, the uploading process was completely automatic. Miami University Library's Digital Initiatives department has uploaded more than 5,000 images using this method, and the results have been outstanding. New users are consistently attracted to the content, and in about a year, images have been viewed nearly 200,000 times. This article will discuss Flickr and the importance of contributing library materials to these types of social media sharing communities, explain the technology and programming involved in the project, and discuss results and outcomes of the project.