Feature request: simple image upload from one or multiple Flickr URL(s)

[trnstlntk]

Many Wikimedians upload (appropriately licensed) images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons.

Upload from Flickr is supported by the (default) Wikimedia Commons UploadWizard (up to 500 files at once): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard

Which is pretty barebones (it literally takes the photo description as on Flickr and then still needs manual input for license and other metadata).

Another frequently used tool is Flickr2Commons by Magnus Manske: https://flickr2commons.toolforge.org/#/

It offers a bit more flexibility and intelligence, but still uploads the descriptions in a quite barebones way.

Advantages of Flickr integration in OpenRefine would include:

• Ability to parse and reconcile elements from the Flickr file descriptions
• Addition of (more) refined and diverse structured data, file names, and Wikitext to the files upon upload

I am posting this after receiving a request for test uploading from the very awesome Biodiversity Heritage Library, which stores many files on Flickr and for whom such a transfer functionality (including the more advanced features that OpenRefine could offer) would be very helpful. Here's one example of an album in their vast Flickr repository. I can imagine more GLAMs are in this situation.

We can't do this before the October 2022 Wikimedia grant deadline, but it's something to keep an eye on for future development. It would be good to involve the Wikimedia Commons / OpenRefine user community to help us prioritize this feature request.

[trnstlntk]

I have dug a bit in the meanwhile, trying to upload images from Flickr using its API. It's doable for power users like me, but I do think a separate feature with friendly UI would make a lot of sense for less experienced users.

Here's some input that can also help inform future development if we will work on this feature:

• I created OpenRefine projects from URL by using https://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photosets.getPhotos.html (to retrieve files from one photoset or album; similar API calls can be done for files from one user, etc.)
• Licenses have a numeric code, documented and retrievable via https://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.licenses.getInfo.html. We can (and should probably) build in a filter that will only allow uploads of files with Wikimedia-compatible licenses.
• Inside the project I then retrieve more metadata for each photo via https://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.getInfo.html and parse it. Photo description and tags are very useful to (as a default) retrieve separately.

[trnstlntk]

While discussing #90 , I realized (from conversations with cultural institutions) that generic Flickr dataset import in OpenRefine (not necessarily focused on Commons upload) is also an expressed use case.

Many cultural institutions have, in the past, uploaded many files from their collections to Flickr / Flickr Commons. Typically, over time, these files have been improved by volunteers (e.g. tags have been added). I've heard the request that institutions would like to access and retrieve these additions to process them further for cleaning and import in their own collections databases.

One example is the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which hosts over 300,000 files on Flickr, for which they would like to harvest data back (without uploading to Commons, as the images are also available there), and make that data more useful/linked as part of their LOD offerings/strategy. I've recently been in conversations with them and can ask further if this is indeed a correct use case.